Apple iPad Air 1st Generation

Apple iPad Air: An Extremely Thin, Yet Powerful iPad

The iPad Air was the first iPad to sport a modern design, AKA slim bezels on all four sides. It was also a much lighter, yet more powerful tablet than its predecessors. Find the original iPad Air on eBay in all colours and configurations.

Released in October 2013, the iPad Air was a radical shift from the iPads that were released before it, both from the outside and within.

• The Air has a 9.7-inch IPS Retina display with a pixel density of 264PPI. The glass protecting the display is scratch-resistant and has an oleophobic coating.
• CPU power comes from the A7 64-bit chip and M7 motion coprocessor. Unlike the one found on the iPhone 5S, this A7 chip doesn’t employ a PoP design and also has a heat spreader for thermal management.
• The rear iSight camera comprises a 5MP CMOS f/2.4 aperture with a hybrid IR filter. The front-facing camera is much improved compared to the iPad 2, facilitating much clearer FaceTime calls.
• Flash memory options start at 16GB and go up to 128GB, with 32 and 64GB being the interim options. All storage variants come with 1GB of RAM.
• The battery is an 8,600 mAh cell that should last 10 hours of continuous multimedia consumption. If you are a light user, endurance should be even better.

The iPad Air shipped with iOS 7. According to Jonathan Ive, iOS 7 and its fresh elements helped restore sanity to the iPad Air’s user interface. The iPad Air featured new icons, refined typography, gyroscope-driven parallaxing, layering, and translucency as its major software-level design changes.

The iPad Air, as mentioned earlier, marked the first significant design shift for iPads since the second-gen iPad.

• Compared to its predecessors, the Air is noticeably thinner at 7.5 millimetres and the bezels are smaller, like the iPad Mini.
• The tablet’s overall volume has been reduced with the use of thinner components, bringing its weight down by 22% compared to the iPad 2.
• The metal edges are chamfered and more aggressively rounded compared to the iPad 4 so that the sides don’t dig into your palms.
• The old volume rocker switch has been replaced by the discreet volume buttons.

The built-in ambient light sensor helps the iPad Air automatically adjust its screen brightness based on its surroundings. There is a three-axis accelerometer that helps the tablet sense orientation and alternate between landscape and portrait modes. Unlike the integrated applications of an iPhone that work only in three orientations, the built-in apps of the iPad Air support four-directional screen rotation, which includes the upside-down orientation.