Apple’s Upcoming iPad Air 3 Fails To Cause Heavy Excitement

Apple sent out its invites for the “Let Us Loop You In” event on March 21. MacRumors has the news.

“Apple today sent out invites for a media event that will be held on Monday, March 21 at the company’s Town Hall auditorium located on its 1 Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino, California…Several products are expected to be showcased at the event, including the new 9.7-inch iPad, the 4-inch iPhone SE, and new Apple Watch bands.”

The article notes that the new 9.7-inch iPad and the four-inch iPhone SE will headline the event, but there could be other things announced. Still, one can’t help wonder about the lack of excitement over a new iPad — something that would have made mouth’s water and minds light up just three years ago. The comments after the article were very telling.

“I’m not sure if there is anything from this event (a first time) that I’m interested in, maybe the AW bands but that’s about it,” says Blujelly.

“I’m sad. Apple just is not showing a lot of innovation here. And yes, I know this is all rumor,” claims Maceric.

Phone Arena lists some details about Apple’s new iPad. They say the iPad Air 3 will have a 7000-series aluminum body with four speakers, a Smart keyboard connector, Apple Pencil support, and it may be as thin as 5mm. The big surprise is that the site claims the new iPad could have a 4K display.

They also claim the tablet will use the A9X chipset with 4GB of RAM, which is the same configuration as the larger iPad Pro. Apple will also keep the 8MP iSight camera. The price of the iPad Air 3, however, won’t increase over the iPad Air 2.

Once again, commenters after the article aren’t very impressed.

“Apple is boring……nothing new!” says SIGPRO.

However, Evan_C sees things differently.

“Looking forward to picking up one of these. iPad Pro didn’t get my attention,” he claims.

Twitter has been rather negative about the iPad Air 3 and other new Apple products.

iPad Air 3. Thinner. Lighter. Even more boring.
*pen sold separately

— Piotr Górecki Jr (@PiotrGoreckiJr) January 27, 2016

(As new Apple Watch bands, small iPhone 6, and small iPad Pro are not very exciting announcement-wise)

— Ben Dodson (@bendodson) March 10, 2016

Apple thought they would revolutionize the tablet industry with the iPad Pro last November. However, the iPad Pro has not earned the reviews Apple is typically used to. Notable technology enthusiast Walt Mossberg of the Verge claimed he is sticking with his iPad Air.

“You’d think an iPad guy like me would be over the moon about the iPad Pro, despite its hefty base price of $799 for a Wi-Fi-only model with 32GB of memory, which stretches to $949 with 128GB of memory, and soars past $1,000 with cellular capability. But I’m not.”

Unlike tablets like the Surface Pro or even the regular Surface, the iPad Pro is not a laptop replacement. It only runs iOS. In other words, you can’t run full-powered versions of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, or even Final Cut Pro on the iPad Pro. Both the Intel Core i5 and i7 versions of the Surface Pro run graphics software pretty well. Some have even called the Surface Pro 4 a desktop replacement in tablet form. If the iPad Air 3 appears to be a smaller version of the iPad Pro, some wonder how Apple will turn this device into a hit.

[Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]