A Winding Road
Apple has actually taken kind of a funny road to get to this point, and in fact the first two generations of “iPad Air,” released in 2013 and 2014, were actually direct successors to Apple’s standard iPad, and the beginning of what many believed at the time was a wholesale rebranding of the family — after the later debut of the iPad Pro, it looked like Apple was going to follow the naming convention for its MacBooks.
However, after two years of seeing the release of nothing but iPad Pro models, 2017 brought a big surprise with a return of the base iPad at a never-before-seen price tag, and seemingly retiring the “Air” name. Apple called the 2017 iPad the “fifth-generation” model, treating it as a direct successor to the 2012 fourth-generation iPad and ignoring the interlude of the iPad Air and iPad Air 2.
This trend continued into 2018, when a sixth-generation iPad, debuted at an education event, added Apple Pencil support and a spec bump, but continued the role of the entry-level model.
Then, last spring, Apple shook things up by bringing back the iPad Air name in the form of what it called a third-generation model. However, the new iPad Air actually had far more in common with the 2017 10.5-inch iPad Pro than it did with the 2014 iPad Air 2. In fact, the case sizes were identical, right down to the addition of the Smart Connector (accessories designed for the 10.5-inch iPad Pro work perfectly with the iPad Air 3), and the only real differences were a lesser rear camera, and the lack of the 120 MHz ProMotion display and stereo speaker system.
Many believed at the time that this was going to be the new baseline model — especially since it was released in the same March timeframe as almost every prior standard iPad model came out (although, ironically, the first two iPad Airs were released in October). However, it seemed unlikely that Apple was willing to give up on its budget iPad — if for no other reason than to draw in business and education customers — and rumours of a new 10.2-inch iPad began to appear, culminating in this week’s release of the new model.