reMarkable Paper Pro: Two-minute review

You don’t own the reMarkable Paper Pro, it owns you. This is a tablet with a single purpose – to capture your ideas. It does that almost perfectly. There are other things you can do with the reMarkable Paper Pro, but it won’t do anything as well as keeping your thoughts and ideas organized and flowing.

It does this by doing almost nothing else. The reMarkable Paper Pro is the follow-up to the reMarkable 2, a monochrome writing tablet with an E Ink display and a Wacom-licensed EMR stylus. The earlier reMarkable earned fans by offering simplicity and a distraction-free environment. It's so well designed and pleasant to use that it becomes addictive, and that’s why I keep using it. 

I bring my reMarkable 2, and now my reMarkable Paper Pro, to every event I cover as a journalist. It’s not just because I love flashing the most pretentious, manicured, single-minded tablet you can own; it’s because the reMarkable feels free and easy in a way my laptop cannot. 

When I have to type notes on a keyboard, I feel constrained. I need to sit. I need to follow the rules of the document app. I can’t easily create and organize notes in the way I want, not without fighting the app.

When I use my reMarkable, I can put my ideas to paper the way I like, and I still get to save everything to Google Drive. In fact, reMarkable has finally relented, and you can now edit documents from the reMarkable app, away from the tablet. That’s been a long-requested feature from reMarkable’s devoted fan base.

The Paper Pro finally gives the most-requested features to reMarkable fans, including a front light for reading in the dark (seriously, you can’t read the reMarkable 2 in the dark), and – drum roll please – a color E Ink display!

I wasn’t expecting a color reMarkable this year, because the color E Ink tablets I’ve seen haven’t been spectacular. reMarkable has incredibly high standards, and the company seemed in no hurry to launch a new, sub-par product.

The reMarkable Paper Pro is a different color E Ink panel from anything I’ve seen before – I’ll talk later about the technology that brought reMarkable out of Kansas to the Land of Oz.

The reMarkable Paper Pro is electronic paper (ePaper), pure and simple, and it’s best not to expect too much from this tablet. It’s the best ePaper you’ve ever used. Since the reMarkable 2 launched in 2020, the company has spent a great deal of its effort improving the writing experience beyond all expectations. There's no perceptible lag between the pen and the ePaper. Writing feels like writing, as it should.

If that doesn’t appeal to you, you may be outside of reMarkable’s target audience, because the reMarkable Paper Pro is truly a luxury device for people who want the feeling of writing on paper, with the convenience of digital storage. This is not a versatile tablet. The list of things the reMarkable cannot do is longer and more surprising than the list of what it can.

There's no web browser on the reMarkable Paper Pro, because the company says the primary goal of the Paper Pro is to help you avoid distractions. To that end, not only can you not browse the web, you can’t even check the time. There's no visible clock on the Paper Pro. No web windows, no clocks – it’s like a Las Vegas casino, if Vegas was about creativity instead of gambling.

Why is there no clock? Because reMarkable knows this won’t be your only screen, or even your second screen. This is the device you buy after your iPhone and MacBook, instead of a distractingly bright and colorful iPad.

The company is unapologetic about its spartan attitude. It takes pride in rejecting far, far more feature requests than it grants: around 95% of the features that users request are rejected, according to reMarkable reps.

If you want a tablet that does a lot more, get an iPad. If you want an E Ink tablet that does a lot more, like running apps and a browser, get an Onyx Boox Note Air 3. If you want an E Ink tablet that's good for reading books, buy an Amazon Kindle Scribe.

The reMarkable Paper Pro will have none of that silliness. This tablet is not for reading, and it’s not for apps, and if you want those things in an ePaper tablet, it’s not for you, either.

reMarkable Paper Pro review: price and availability

• Starts at $579 / £559 / AU $929 with a Marker
• New Type Folio available at launch for $229 / £180 / AU $330 extra

The reMarkable Paper Pro is very expensive, especially considering how much this tablet doesn’t do. An Apple iPad costs from $449 / £499 / AU$749, without an Apple Pencil of course, and Apple’s tablet can do just about everything. The reMarkable Paper Pro, on the other hand, seems positively archaic by comparison. 

That’s entirely the point, and the design and materials are deceptively advanced, as I’ll discuss below in the Design section. This is an ultra-premium, luxury device, even though it lacks features we normally associate with luxury tablets. 

Depending on your region, reMarkable might try to sell you a tablet without a Marker, but don’t buy it – or rather, buy the Marker. You need it. The reMarkable Paper Pro isn’t a very good reading device. Also, unlike the reMarkable 2, the new Paper Pro doesn’t use Wacom’s EMR technology for its pen. The Marker is now proprietary reMarkable technology, so you can’t just get the tablet and then buy your own cheaper pen. A Samsung S Pen will not work with the reMarkable Paper Pro, as it will with a reMarkable 2.

You really should use a case or folio with this tablet, and the reMarkable Book Folios are very nice, whether you choose the recycled fabric or the leather. The newer Book Folios have a strap to hold the Marker in place. If you don’t like these covers, just wait a bit, because I’d expect a robust market for third-party covers will pop up on Etsy, just as it did for the reMarkable 2.

If you want to type on the reMarkable Paper Pro, in addition to writing with the Marker, reMarkable is offering a Type Folio keyboard for $229. Just like the tablet itself, the Type Folio keyboard is incredibly thin. With the Type Folio attached, the reMarkable is about as thick as most tablets with a basic folio cover. The Paper Pro is a larger tablet than the reMarkable 2, so the older Type Folio will not work with the new reMarkable.

The reMarkable 2 will still be available, now for even less. A bundle starts at $379, which is a drop from the previous $399 / £399 / AU$679 pricing, though still more than the Kindle Scribe, which sells for $339 / £329 / AU$549.

Unfortunately, reMarkable will not be accepting any older tablets as a trade-in for the new reMarkable Paper Pro. This is a big mistake, but for a company that started on Kickstarter, I get it. It’s not like reMarkable makes a new tablet every year and encourages regular upgrading. If you have the reMarkable 2, just keep it, it’s still great.

• Value score: 4/5

reMarkable Paper Pro review: specs

reMarkable Paper Pro review: display

• New E Ink Gallery 3 display isn't being used in other tablets
• Color is built into the pixels, not a separate layer

If you’re not familiar with E Ink, you should know about ePaper first. Unlike an LCD or OLED computer monitor, ePaper is a category of display that is designed to emulate paper. You can read an ePaper display outdoors in bright sunlight because it reflects light. An ePaper display also usually looks the same whether it's powered on or off. 

There are a few different types of ePaper technology, and reMarkable uses an ePaper display from a company called E Ink – the screen tech is also called E Ink. Amazon’s Kindle e-reader tablets all use E Ink displays, and so do the reading and writing tablets from Kobo and Onyx. 

E Ink is an amazing technology. Where your phone screen lights up and makes a picture when electricity passes through it, E Ink doesn’t light up at all. It makes a picture with tiny, almost microscopic balls. These balls sit in tiny little wells, and when electricity is applied, they rise to the top so you can see them. 

The benefit of E Ink displays is that they can consume less power, because the screen will draw a page of words and then… do nothing. It sits still while you read, and it doesn’t require any juice. The screen only uses power when you have to turn the page, or scroll down. This makes it ideal for applications like reading and writing, where there isn’t a lot of page-turning and scrolling.

E Ink is very bad at displaying video and any task that requires a lot of movement on-screen. The screen cannot refresh nearly as quickly as a phone screen. Your phone's display can update at up to 120 times per second, while the fastest E Ink screen can barely top 10-15 frames per second – and even then, it’s drawing a lot more power than an E Ink screen was intended to use.

The reMarkable Paper Pro is a brand new E Ink screen, at least for tablets. The E Ink Gallery 3 technology has been used in digital signage commercially, but it hasn’t been used in a successful writing tablet. reMarkable is calling its brand of Gallery 3 E Ink the Canvas display.

There are other E Ink color tablets, like the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra C and the Kobo Libra Colour. Those tablets use an E Ink Kaleido screen. The difference is where the color sits. On the Kaleido display, you have a black-and-white E Ink layer, just like any e-reader. Then you have a layer of color that sits just above the black-and-white layer.

The Kaleido display can refresh quickly, but the color has to allow the black and white layer to be visible beneath, so it uses a lower color resolution. The color does not look very saturated. If you see one of these screens in person, they almost have a layered effect to the color that seems off compared to color print or a similar medium.

The new Gallery 3 E Ink panel on the reMarkable Paper Pro, on the other hand, puts the color in the same layer as the black-and-white. This gives you better color resolution and a sharper image, but it takes the display longer to draw and update color. In fact, E Ink told me that while the black ink can refresh in 350 milliseconds (ms), the color ink can take anywhere from 500ms to 1.5 seconds to finish drawing, for the most accurate color.

We’ve been waiting four years for a new reMarkable tablet, and the addition of color was highly anticipated by fans, though I was skeptical, as I’ve seen tablets that use color E Ink ‘Kaleido’ panels. I can’t say that the reMarkable color display is perfect, but it definitely looks better than the E Ink competition, and it adds a layer of usefulness.

The colors are still faint, even though reMarkable has added a light to the new Paper Pro tablet. The light is very dim, just barely bright enough power to let you read in the dark. Unlike the Amazon Kindle Scribe, which packs a bevy of LED backlights, the reMarkable Paper Pro gives you a meager candle for reading, and little more.

That said, if you know where to look for the quality, you’ll find it. The reMarkable Paper Pro looks like paper and ink. The display may seem a bit grey, but it looks bone-white compared to other ePaper tablets. The ink color is highly visible and looks like real ink, no matter what color you now choose. The display feels great for writing – not so much like paper, but like expensive stationery. All around, this is a writing tablet for connoisseurs of writing tablets.

• Display score: 4 / 5

reMarkable Paper Pro review: Design

• Thinner than an iPad Pro, even with the new lights
• Accessories are a must, not a maybe

The reMarkable Paper Pro is an incredibly well-built device, and it has a premium finish and design that is truly… impeccable. Even though the new reMarkable Paper Pro has a larger battery than the reMarkable 2, a fully-lit display, and new color E Ink technology, it remains one of the thinnest tablets you can buy, if not the thinnest. 

The new iPad Pro that Apple brags is its thinnest product ever? That 5.3mm fatso needs to lose a couple tenths of a millimeter if it wants to brag against the 5.1mm reMarkable Paper Pro, or the even thinner (and still available) 4.7mm reMarkable 2. 

The latest reMarkable is larger than before, so unfortunately the older accessories like the Type Folio won’t work. And you’re definitely going to want a case for this tablet. It feels solid, but it's so thin and light that I’d hate to put its durability to a stress test. The reMarkable folios are all very high-quality, and I expect third party options will appear before long. 

• Design score: 5/5

reMarkable Paper Pro review: Software

• Not so much software, more like paper with some features
• No apps, no home screen, just notes

The reMarkable Paper Pro keeps things very simple. You have notes (called Notebooks) and folders. That’s it. You can tag your notes, then search those tags later to jump to a specific notebook or section in a book. 

There is no app store. There is no home screen with widgets and icons. You can see your folders, and you can click on the folders to see the notes inside them. That’s all. I love the simplicity. If you’re tired of saving photos or files on your phone, then having no idea where they went, the reMarkable Paper Pro is a soothing balm. You will never lose anything, because it’s simply right in front of you. 

When you write a note, you can handwrite or type text. There's an onscreen keyboard for typography if you don’t buy the Type Folio. 

The Paper Pro can convert handwriting to typed text, but the feature is very rudimentary. It was able to recognize most of my writing, but when it could not figure out my chicken scratch, it just skipped that word. 

Worst of all, the final product is ugly and hard to correct. In fact, a huge weakness of the reMarkable software is how difficult it can be to edit, change, and move things around, especially typed text. It's very hard to select the right word, or a group of words, because the screen can feel unresponsive. It is almost impossible to create a proper layout using type – you’re better off just drawing what you want. 

Sadly, there are very few helpful drawing tools, either. There is no help making straight lines, and nothing to make shapes. You can’t create stickers to add to your documents, which would be a boon for journaling fans.

You can write in color, or paint in color, or highlight in color, but the color features are just as limited as everything else. Don’t expect the reMarkable Paper Pro to be your new drawing tablet. The color options are scant and unalterable. You can’t tap to fill a space with color, for instance.

You can’t even pick your own colors. You get the colors reMarkable has chosen, and that’s all. No color picker, no blending colors. Colors are for organization and ideas, not, well, coloring.

Actually, that’s not true, because I downloaded a PDF with some mindfulness exercises that include coloring, and though my color options are limited, I can still have fun making pretty pictures. You can load any PDF or ePUB document onto the reMarkable Paper Pro, either through the mobile or desktop app, or using a Chrome extension that converts web pages into PDFs. Once you have a document loaded, you can draw and color upon it to your heart’s content.

• Software score: 2/5

reMarkable Paper Pro review: Performance

• Amazing pen response, with new pen technology
• Screen can feel very sluggish with touch, especially swipes

The reMarkable Paper Pro has a lot more power than before, but for what? The most advanced feature, and maybe the only advanced feature, is handwriting recognition, a technology that predates the earliest iPhone. 

Actually, I’ve talked to developers who work with E Ink who tell me that the screen technology is astonishingly difficult to program, so perhaps the improved performance is driving the more complex color display. 

The problem is that the reMarkable Paper Pro feels very slow. Not when you’re writing. Writing works at light speed. The new Marker uses an active technology, powered by a rechargeable battery, that makes response time even faster, according to reMarkable. Writing feels very fast and fluid, with absolutely no discernible lag. 

Navigating the reMarkable Paper Pro, though, feels like a serious drag. Swiping to the next page often took multiple swipes. Scrolling could be unresponsive on longer documents, and pinch-zooming might not work on the first attempt. 

Once you have your document template set up, everything feels snappy. Writing, drawing, and coloring with the new brushes works with perfect fluidity. It feels like writing on real paper, not writing on a laggy screen. Once you’re done, have some patience, because it could take a while to send your file, or navigate to the next folder. 

• Performance score: 3 / 5

reMarkable Paper Pro review: Battery

• Two weeks of battery life, even with the light continually on
• That's because the light is very dim

Before you get impressed by the two weeks of battery life that the reMarkable Paper Pro can offer, remember that an Amazon Kindle with an E Ink display can last more than a month with steady use. The reMarkable is impressive, but it isn’t the best ePaper device for battery life. 

It’s still much better than competing devices from Onyx, like the Onyx Boox Air 3. Onyx pushes its E Ink displays to the limit, and Boox tablets can actually display videos, or browse regular web pages, or even run games, like any other Android tablet (almost). Pushing E Ink faster drains power very quickly, though. E Ink is meant to be slow and steady, not fast. 

The reMarkable Paper Pro charges via USB-C, and it comes with a charging cord. I’m not sure how fast it charges because the battery lasts two weeks, so I didn’t mind a slower charge-up. 

• Battery score: 5 / 5

Should I buy the reMarkable Paper Pro?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

Also consider

How I tested the reMarkarble Paper Pro

I received the reMarkable Paper Pro a few weeks before this review was published, and I used it as my primary note-taking and journaling tool, both for work and personal use. I normally use a reMarkable 2 for these tasks, so I'm familiar with the tablet’s capabilities and limitations. 

I charged the reMarkable Paper Pro at the beginning of my review period and then didn't charge it again until I needed to take photos for this review, to ensure that reMarkable’s battery-life claims were accurate. After two weeks, I tested charging again on my standard USB-C charger. 

I connected the reMarkable Paper Pro to my Google Drive account for document synchronization, as well as the Google Chrome browser. I used the reMarkable app on my MacBook, Android phone, and iPhone. 

I gave the reMarkable Paper Pro to folks with more drawing ability and artistic talent than I have and asked them what they think. I did not tell them what tablet they were using. I also downloaded a number of third-party PDF files from Etsy to try them with the reMarkable Paper Pro.

I used the reMarkable Paper Pro with reMarkable’s Book Folio and Type Folio cases, typing extensively with the keyboard. 

Read more about how we test.

• First reviewed: September 2024

Apple iPad Air 13-inch (2024): one-minute review

Does it bother me that the new iPad Air is no longer Apple’s lightest iPad? Not really. It’s just the irony of the thing. The Air branding was always intended to signify lightness in weight and design, and even at 13 inches the new iPad Air still fulfills that promise; just don’t hold it next to the more advanced and pricier iPad Pro, which is thinner and lighter than not only this tablet but the new 11-inch Air.

What does matter here is the now vast creative and entertainment landscape that is the iPad Air 13-inch. It’s a screen size I never thought I needed, let alone would enjoy; but in a way, I’ve been lying to myself.

I used the 12.9 iPad Pro all the time. It’s kind of heavy and a bit awkward, but I can’t argue with the huge display when it comes to big drawings and big-screen mobile TV and movie viewing. In fact, I love watching content from my favorite streaming services on it. But it’s expensive, and it perhaps feels like overkill for the task at hand. The iPad Air 13-inch is the more affordable option for those with big-screen iPad dreams.

It’s also a worthy update for any current iPad Air owner. You get a significant screen-size bump (almost 20% more real estate), more storage (it now starts at 128GB), more power thanks to the impressive M2 chip, and a far better placement for that sharp and useful ultra-wide FaceTime camera.

You could spend less on a 10.9-inch iPad, but then you’d miss out on that next-generation Apple silicon performance, Apple Pencil Pro support, and the svelte 6.1mm frame.

If all-out power is your thing, you might be considering the even thinner iPad Pro and its powerful new M4 processor; but if you’re reading this review, that will likely be overkill. In my experience, the M2 chip has more than enough power for most iPad users.

During my testing I used the new Air for everything from content consumption and web browsing to pro-level music editing and console-level gaming, and the iPad Air 13-inch and M2 chip had power to spare.

If you’re looking for the perfect balance of price, performance, and screen size, the iPad Air 13-inch is the tablet I’d recommend and easily joins our list of the best tablets.

Apple iPad Air 13-inch (2024): price and availability

• Available May 7 for $599 / £599 / AUS$999 (11-inch) and $799 / £799 / AUS$1,299 (13-inch)
• 8GB RAM standard. Storage options range from 128GB to 1TB

Apple’s 13-inch iPad Air and the smaller 11-inch model are available now, starting at $799 / £799 / AU$1,299 and $599 / £599 / AU$999, respectively. Both iPad Air options start with 128GB of storage but can be configured with up to 1TB, with 256GB and 512GB options. My test unit was configured with cellular support and 512GB of storage.

• Value score: 4.5 / 5

Apple iPad Air 13-inch (2024): specs

Apple iPad Air 13-inch (2024): design

• Bigger but familiar
• Solid construction
• Design is almost iconic
• Air a slight misnomer

While it’s fair to call the design of the iPad Air 13-inch (2024) familiar, this tablet is also quite different. It’s the lightweight but big-screen iPad Air you dreamed of and, if you can ignore that even thinner 13-inch iPad Pro over there, it’s one of the most exciting new iPad entries in a long time.

While it shares its 6.1mm profile with previous iPad Airs, things diverge from there. This is an 11.04 x 8.46-inch / 28 x 21.5cm recycled aluminum and glass slab that weighs 1.36lbs / 617g. Considering all the extra screen real estate, that’s a pretty remarkable accomplishment (again, pay no mind to the essentially 1lb (579g) iPad Pro 13-inch over there).

Admittedly, little else has changed on this larger slab. The 12MP rear camera is in the same relative spot, as are the volume buttons near the top of one long edge, and the adjacent and responsive Touch ID button. Even the size of the screen bezel looks the same (though it is slightly thinner). But within that black border lies an important update: the FaceTime camera is finally on one of the wider landscape edges, and now sits right below the Apple Pencil magnetic connector (used to pair and charge the Pencil). This small yet significant change required reengineering the charging technology in the new Apple Pencil Pro and inside the new iPad Airs and Pros, which is why the new Pencil Pro is only compatible with the new iPads, and why the new iPads aren’t compatible with all older Pencils. The update also required the shifting of a microphone from the top edge of the iPad to the adjacent bezel (it sits almost an inch away from the camera).

In other words, the iPad Air 13-inch is both fresh and familiar. It’s elegant, thin, lightweight, and big enough to support a wide range of activities. It also makes for a great pairing with Apple’s latest Magic Keyboard, which, while it hasn’t been redesigned to the same extent as the new Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, is still an excellent, full-sized keyboard for the iPad Air, with a responsive trackpad.

Thanks to the new Air’s much larger screen, the combination feels more than ever like an ultraportable laptop. Just keep in mind that the Magic Keyboard will set you back an eye-popping $349 / £349.00 (almost half of what you pay for a base-model iPad Air 13-inch). The Magic Keyboard for iPad Air 11-inch costs $299 / £299.00. At that point, you might consider buying a MacBook Air 13-inch running the M3 chip (it costs less); just bear in mind that you’ll be gaining some weight and losing both the touchscreen and Apple Pencil compatibility.

• Design score: 4.5 / 5

Apple iPad Air 13-inch (2024): display

• Sharp and colorful
• The 13-inch model gives you more nits
• Roomy and responsive

Like much of the rest of the iPad Air, the tablet’s Liquid Retina display is basically the same as the display on the smaller iPad Air 5th generation, aside from being much larger. Yes, there are a lot more pixels to play with – instead of 1640 x 2360 pixels, you get 2732 x 2048. It’s still the same 264ppi and eye-pleasing Wide color (P3) support, though you do get 600 nits max brightness on this 13-inch iPad Air (the 11-inch model remains at 500 nits). There’s an anti-reflective coating that does a decent job in bright direct light, and the oleophobic film is somewhat effective at repelling fingerprints. As I write this on the iPad Air 13-inch I can’t spot a single smudge, but if I turn off the screen quite a few are evident.

Numbers aside, what matters here is image quality, and across a wide variety of content types, it’s excellent. Everything from photos I took with the iPad to movies, console-level games, apps, websites, and video calls looks great on it. It only suffers a bit in comparison to its new big brother, the M4 iPad Pro, which boasts Apple’s new ‘tandem OLED’ Ultra Retina XDR display. If insanely deep blacks and eye-popping specular highlights are your thing, you may want to consider this more expensive option.

• Display score: 4/5

Apple iPad Air 13-inch (2024): cameras

• The FaceTime camera is now on the landscape side
• No other significant photography changes

The iPad Air 13-inch has two cameras: a 12MP (f/1.8) wide on the back and a 12MP ultrawide (f/2.4) on the front.

That ultra-wide is there not so much to capture group selfies but for use with Apple’s Center Stage technology, which basically pans the camera frame around the full frame to keep you in view. When I use it during FaceTime calls, it means I can get up and walk around in front of the iPad Air, and the FaceTime camera will crop in to keep me close and in the center of the frame. If you take a selfie, the camera will capture a regular ultra-wide snap.

The rear camera still includes a 5x digital zoom (it’s fine but I would never recommend a digital zoom over an optical one if it’s available) and can even shoot 63MP megapixel panoramic if you fancy holding a 13-inch tablet steady as you slowly pan from one street to another.

On the video front, the FaceTime camera can shoot up to 1080p 60fps video and timelapse video. The rear camera can shoot 4K at up to 60fps, along with slow-motion video up to 240fps (720p), and timelapse. Both cameras offer cinematic video stabilization, which crops the overall frame to reduce screen shake and give your videos a smoother look.

I understand that some people love shooting photos with their iPads, especially because the screen acts as a huge viewfinder, and I guess they’ll be even more pleased with the even larger display of the iPad Air 13-inch. The photos I took for good. There’s lots of color and detail but I far prefer the image quality I can get with my iPhone 15 Pro Max’s camera array.

• Camera score: 4/5

Apple iPad Air 13-inch (2024): software

• iPadOS is familiar and full of utility
• This much screen real estate cries out for richer multi-tasking

I’m generally a fan of iPadOS, even as it straddles the line between a tablet platform and a more open one designed for a laptop. I appreciate the ease with which I can use Sidecar to connect the iPad 13-inch’s big screen to my MacBook Air and use it as another desktop extension. Universal control mode, where I can seamlessly move my laptop mouse from the Mac screen to the iPad, makes the tablet seem like a cohesive part of the macOS ecosystem.

Being able to have up to three windows open and running different or multiple instances of apps like Safari is useful, but I’m ready to have even more control and start defining the total number of windows I want running on the iPad. Maybe that will come in iPadOS18.

There are so many things I enjoy doing on the iPad, like writing, communicating, video, messaging, playing games, and watching action movies, but nothing compares to drawing on an iPad.

I spent hours drawing this dog in Procreate. Even though Procreate did not at the time support the new Apple Pencil Pro features like barrel roll and squeeze (more about these below) to change settings and tools (that functionality came later during my tests, and only in beta apps), it was still a pleasure. There is zero delay between my touching the Pencil to the screen and digital ink ‘flowing’ out of it.

For the purposes of my review, Apple provided me with a $129 / £129 / AU$219 Apple Pencil Pro. This new digital stylus is a dead ringer for the Apple Pencil 2nd Generation, but there are some big differences. The new Pencil introduces barrel roll, which uses a gyroscope to track when you’re rolling the pencil. On-screen, the digital pen tip turns from a vertical orientation to a horizontal one.

Once I got my hands on a beta version of Procreate, I found the feature a fun and creative addition to my drawing arsenal. Instead of using the studio pen settings in Procreate to vary the pen width, I just twisted the Pencil Pro in my fingers to switch nub orientation and fluidly change width.

Squeeze, which I accessed while using a beta version of the animation app Procreate Dreams, lets you squeeze the lower third of the pencil to access customized art app features, and haptics gives you vibration feedback on the Pencil. In Procreate Dreams, for example, a squeeze opens a rich circular options menu.

I’ve been drawing for a while on the iPad Pro 12.9 inch. I love the big canvas, but at 1.5lbs / 680g the iPad Pro 12.9 is a little unwieldy, and the lighter and thinner iPad Air 13-inch is a welcome change. Drawing on a screen this size takes me back to my old pencil and drawing-pad days. Drawing on a 10.9-inch, or even 11-inch display can feel confining compared to 13 inches of digital space.

While Apple is expending considerable effort in pitching the iPad Pro as the ultimate creative tool, the iPad Air can hold its own in this respect, and I had no trouble editing 4K video in iMovie or managing dozens of tracks in Logic Pro.

• Software score: 4 / 5

Apple iPad Air 13-inch (2024): performance

• M2 is aging but still very powerful
• Double the base storage
• Hard to find something the tablet couldn't do

At the heart of the iPad Air 13-inch’s impressive performance is the M2 chip, a piece of Apple silicon I’ve had experience with in the last-gen MacBook Air. Even though this chip is now two generations behind the iPad Pro’s M4, it’s no slouch.

With an 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine (backed by 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage – up from 64GB), there’s still significant headroom on this aging bit of silicon. Even now, the Geekbench 6.3 numbers are impressive, and align with what I saw on the MacBook Air M2; and while its scores are lower than those of the M3, they remain among the best you can get for this class of product. In other benchmarks that looked at gaming and 3D performance, we saw significant improvement over the iPad Pro 12.9’s M1 performance.

All that performance is only interesting, though, if it powers real-world apps. The tablet is an able gaming platform. I raced around a track in Grid AutoSport Custom Edition, and was pleased to see nothing but smooth motion and zero lag. The iPad Air 13-inch also performed well when I played the incredibly creepy Resident Evil 4. The motion was smooth, and there was only a tiny bit of pixelation in the action sequences. I played that game with and without headphones – the landscape stereo speakers, which are positioned on either side of the tablet, deliver excellent and quite rich audio, but I highly recommend enjoying all videos and gaming content audio through a pair of AirPod Pros 2 to get the full Spatial Audio experience.

• Performance score: 4.5 / 5

Apple iPad Air 13-inch (2024): battery and connectivity

• All-day battery life depending on activity
• Can sip power for basic tasks
• More intense ones can drain it faster
• No Wi-Fi 7

Battery life is rated to last a “full day” according to Apple, or around 10 hours. Our test put it at 11 hours and thirty minutes. In more anecdotal tests, my battery life ranged from 10 hours to as little as eight or six depending on the activity and settings (like screen brightness).

My iPad Air 13-inch test unit came with 5G connectivity. It was reasonably solid on my commute home, but my neighborhood is a 5G desert, so I had to make do with LTE. The iPad Air supports WiFi 6E, but oddly not the emerging WiFi 7 standard. There’s also support for Bluetooth 5.3. As with most US-based iPhones, the iPad Air is eSIM-only, but in all markets.

• Battery and connectvity score: 4 / 5

Should you buy the Apple iPad Air 13-inch (2024)?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

Also consider

Not convinced by the iPad Air 13-inchPad? Here are a few other options to consider:

How I tested the Apple iPad Air 13-inch

Apple loaned me an iPad Air 13-inch, Apple Pencil Pro, and the Magic Keyboard. Over almost a week, I used the iPad Air to do everything from stream content, to draw in Procreate, manage email, and browse the Web. I also used it to write this review.

I ran some of my own benchmarks but also relied on Future Labs for additional benchmark data and battery rundown tests.

I used the new Apple Pencil Pro for drawing, though its barrel roll and squeeze menu access features were not available during the majority of my testing time.

First reviewed May 2024