When Apple first announced the M2 iPad Air during its “Let Loose” event, it advertised the device as having a 10-core GPU. This was incorrect, as the tablet has only a 9-core GPU. According to Apple, these specs were a mix-up, and other performance claims about the iPad Air are still accurate.
While it’s not great to advertise a certain spec to customers and have them preorder and buy a device based on that claim, this isn’t a huge difference on paper, and you shouldn’t see any real difference in performance. According to a statement Apple made to 9to5Mac, “We are updating Apple.com to correct the core count for the M2 iPad Air. All performance claims for the M2 iPad Air are accurate and based on a 9-core GPU.”
You can already see this change on Apple’s press release about the iPad Air from May 7 and on the iPad Air support page. It’s not clear how this mix-up happened; it could be as simple as a typo. In the past, M2 devices have used 8-core and 10-core GPU configurations, so it’s possible that some older copy got reused and never fixed.
Despite all this, according to Apple, the iPad Air M2 should still be 50% faster than the iPad Air M1 for productivity and creativity tasks and 3x faster than the iPad Air with the A14 Bionic chip. All the published benchmarks for the iPad Air M2 should still be valid, so this isn’t as big of an issue as it could have been if there was a tangible performance difference.
As The Verge points out, Apple is usually loath to admit errors. It took weeks for the company to acknowledge a bug that was resurfacing deleted iPhone photos. In our opinion, the best practice in situations like this is to reach out to customers directly as soon as you find out about a mistake, rather than sitting on it for weeks. Mistakes and bugs happen, but how a company handles them is what makes the difference.
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