Unboxing Apple's new iPad Air 2, with Smart Case & Smart Cover
Apple's latest iPad Air 2 is super fast, super slim and incorporates the same Touch ID and Secure Element as iPhone 6, enabling secure Apple Pay transactions within apps. Here's what it looks like naked, and in Apple's custom Smart Case and Smart Cover.
The iPad Air 2 box ships is emblazoned with the slim profile of the tablet, which at 6.1mm (.24 inch) is now as thin as an iPod touch.
The box itself hasn't changed much; it's still larger than necessary, as all it contains is the super slim tablet supercomputer, a USB Lightning cable and an iPad power block for quick charging.
Pulled from the box, the new Air 2 is light (437g for the WiFi version, 444g for the cellular variant) and feels perfectly slim, thinner than a pad of paper. It feels like an electronic clipboard designed to digitize tasks for mobile workers, as analyst Ben Bajarin has astutely described.
There's few external surprises; the flush Touch ID works just as on an iPhone. There's a centered Lightning port with speaker holes on either side along the bottom, and customary volume and power buttons (but no physical switch for locking orientation, now that you can easily do that via iOS' Control Center).
As with previous models, Apple offers an optional Smart Case (black shown below) which covers the backside and wraps around to magnetically flip over the face, or alternatively a Smart Cover, which snaps onto the side magnetically, leaving the rear exposed but protecting the front.
The new iPad Air 2 is already gaining attention for its incredible speed, a product of Apple's new triple core, 64-bit A8X Application Processor and 2GB of RAM.
In CPU performance, the new iPad Air 2 leaps ahead of this summer's gaming-centric Nvidia Shield Tablet powered by the 32-bit version of same company's Tegra K1 chip. Google recently unveiled its own upcoming Nexus 9 tablet, built by HTC and incorporating the 64-bit "Denver" version of Nvidia's Tegra K1, although the benchmarks we found for it don't show any real improvement over the Shield Tablet in multicore performance.
AppleInsider will separately profile the GPU performance of iPad Air 2, comparing it against competing tablet GPUs from Samsung, Qualcomm and Nvidia. Also watch for our in-depth review of the new iPad Air 2, and ask any questions you'd like answered in the comments below.
The iPad Air 2 box ships is emblazoned with the slim profile of the tablet, which at 6.1mm (.24 inch) is now as thin as an iPod touch.
The box itself hasn't changed much; it's still larger than necessary, as all it contains is the super slim tablet supercomputer, a USB Lightning cable and an iPad power block for quick charging.
Pulled from the box, the new Air 2 is light (437g for the WiFi version, 444g for the cellular variant) and feels perfectly slim, thinner than a pad of paper. It feels like an electronic clipboard designed to digitize tasks for mobile workers, as analyst Ben Bajarin has astutely described.
There's few external surprises; the flush Touch ID works just as on an iPhone. There's a centered Lightning port with speaker holes on either side along the bottom, and customary volume and power buttons (but no physical switch for locking orientation, now that you can easily do that via iOS' Control Center).
Smart Case & Smart Cover
As with previous models, Apple offers an optional Smart Case (black shown below) which covers the backside and wraps around to magnetically flip over the face, or alternatively a Smart Cover, which snaps onto the side magnetically, leaving the rear exposed but protecting the front.
The new iPad Air 2 is already gaining attention for its incredible speed, a product of Apple's new triple core, 64-bit A8X Application Processor and 2GB of RAM.
In CPU performance, the new iPad Air 2 leaps ahead of this summer's gaming-centric Nvidia Shield Tablet powered by the 32-bit version of same company's Tegra K1 chip. Google recently unveiled its own upcoming Nexus 9 tablet, built by HTC and incorporating the 64-bit "Denver" version of Nvidia's Tegra K1, although the benchmarks we found for it don't show any real improvement over the Shield Tablet in multicore performance.
Apple's A8X powered iPad Air 2 smokes Android tabs, including Nvidia's Tegra K1 Shield Tablet http://t.co/pUZqsxlUWU pic.twitter.com/CYsI8mzJ6J
-- Daniel Eran Dilger (@DanielEran) AppleInsider will separately profile the GPU performance of iPad Air 2, comparing it against competing tablet GPUs from Samsung, Qualcomm and Nvidia. Also watch for our in-depth review of the new iPad Air 2, and ask any questions you'd like answered in the comments below.
Comments
I'm scratching my head at the "still larger than necessary" remark... how could the box be any narrower in any of its dimensions?
Pretty sure it’s just the angle. Of the case surrounding the lens that we can see, it remains the same distance therefrom.
Can AI please learn to use "Save for Web & Devices" in Photoshop? You can easily save 75% with no loss in image quality. Each of these photos are more than 2.5MB. That is just plain rude to people with data plans. No excuse! The pictures aren't even very good.
Only if you sit on it.
Can you bend it?
Oh my f.... gosh, that is the single funniest thing I have ever read. It really does get funnier every time it's written. Even though it's been idiotically spouted in every single thread in the last month, it just hasn't lost its comedic value.
You should do stand up. What I mean by that is you shouldn't post on here.
This has two speakers, just like the Air and all Minis.
There are holes for two sets of speakers. Are there two speakers in this thing or just one like the older models? Is it louder, subjectively?
Two
[IMG]http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2014/01/clamcaseformini.jpg[/IMG]
Fixed.
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I totally agree and was just about to say the same thing. It got old the first couple of times it was said but now that we're on thousandth time it's down right ridiculous. STOP already!
I got mine this morning too!
I don't have much to say, except for that I'm happy with it!
Call me crazy, but I swear that it feels lighter than my original iPad Mini when I pick it up, even though the iPad Mini is technically lighter according to the specs.
One other significant change from using my iPad 3, is that I notice that the sound level is louder (which is definitely a good thing!), probably due to the two speakers instead of one.
Some MacRumors users are complaining about feeling a vibration when playing video/audio. I'm sure that will be the next "gate".
That's definitely true.
I noticed that right away also. I'm used to mostly using an iPad 3, which is basically built like a tank, and I noticed right away that sound definitely vibrates more when using the iPad Air 2. When playing a game or doing something on the iPad where you are holding it in your hands, you can definitely feel the vibrations.
I'm not saying that it's a bad thing, I'm just saying that it was definitely a noticable difference for me, coming from my iPad 3.