New iPad prices for South Africa revealed

Digicape, a South African Apple Premium Reseller, has opened pre-orders and announced the prices for the recently announced iPad Air M3 and iPad A16.

Apple rolled out a new iPad Air along with a redesigned keyboard accessory and an upgraded low-end tablet, enhancing devices that helped lift holiday sales despite an iPhone slump.

The new iPad Air models come in the same 11-inch and 13-inch size options, priced from R13,599 and R17,999, with a move from the M2 chip to the M3 being the main upgrade.

The device is now twice as fast as the M1 edition from a few years ago, Apple said when it announced the revamped range.

Orders opened in the United States on 4 March, with shipments and in-store availability beginning on 12 March. The South African launch date has not yet been confirmed.

The M3 chip — like the M2 brought to the iPad Air last May — has nine graphics cores in the graphics processing unit, and eight main processing cores in the CPU.

The key upgrade in the chip is a technology called ray tracing, a technique for modelling light and shadows in graphical applications, especially games.

As with last year’s model, Apple is promoting the iPad Air as supporting Apple Intelligence. The company said AI tasks run 60% faster on the M3 edition iPad Air compared to the M1 version from 2022.

The rest of the iPad Air’s specifications — including its 12-megapixel front and back cameras, battery life and form factor — remain the same.

This iPad Air update represents a faster turnaround than usual, coming only 10 months after the last version. The company is looking to keep up momentum for the line, which saw revenue grow 15% over the holidays.

Apple uses its chips to differentiate its hardware and has shown a willingness in recent years to upgrade its devices more rapidly.

The M3 iPad Air comes in the same colors as last year: blue, purple, starlight and space gray. As with the previous generation, there are also storage options ranging from 128 gigabytes to a terabyte.

Buyers can also elect for the more expensive variants of the device that come with 5G connectivity.

A 13-inch model with the highest storage capacity and cellular connectivity costs R32,999

While the iPad Air doesn’t get any major new features or exterior changes, the company has introduced a new lower-end Magic Keyboard that mimics some of the features of the revamped iPad Pro keyboard accessory that debuted last year.

The new iPad Air keyboard has a larger trackpad, a metal hinge and a row of function keys. Its South African price has not yet been announced.

In the US, the new keyboard accessory costs $269 (R4,865) or $319 (R5,765) depending on screen size. Dollar-to-rand conversions exclude all taxes payable in South Africa, including 15% VAT and 9% ad valorem duty.

Apple also updated its low-end, iPad with an 11-inch screen to include the A16 chip.

In South Africa, it will start from R7,799 for the Wi-Fi only variant, while the one with 5G connectivity is R11,399.

The prior model featured an A14 processor. The new model’s performance is 30% faster than the previous generation, according to the company.

Digicape’s pre-order prices are summarised in the table below.