How to sell your used and unwanted gadgets

It’s new-phone season again, between all the announcements at Mobile World Congress last month and the inevitable release of new iPhones and Pixels looming in the fall. Which means you’ll be faced with a hard choice: upgrade or stick it out another year with your current device. The annual cycle of new flagship handset releases can be a little tough on your wallet, though, which is why you might want to offset the cost by putting your old device up for sale. But which trade-in service will yield you the biggest bang for your buck? And how much of a pain will it be? We’ve rounded up some of the leading contenders for offloading your old electronics. Not just phones, either — perhaps you have an old laptop that isn’t quite cutting it anymore, or maybe you’ve got some other stuff sitting in the closet collecting dust.

Trade-in sites

RECYCLE-PHONES/

If you’re looking for the littlest hassle and want your money as soon as possible, there are plenty of sites that will automate the trade-in process. You’ll select your device from a list, get a quote within a minute and send the device back for cash in a matter of days.

Decluttr

Decluttr definitely lives up to its name. Not only can you sell phones from a number of manufacturers, including Apple, Samsung and HTC, but the site also takes lots of physical media, including CDs, DVDs, video games and books. For devices, you’ll be asked for a general assessment of its condition, and given a quote immediately. Once you complete your order the site will send you a free shipping label. Decluttr also reaches back pretty far like with sales of the iPhone 6, though it’ll offer you only $5 for an 16GB model in good condition.

uSell

uSell operates as a broker, searching other sites for their best offers on a given device and taking care of the rest. Like most buyback sites, it’s big on iPhones, but you can still sell off other manufacturers’ devices; it really depends on who’s buying them at that point. The selection is a bit of a grab bag — newer phones like the Galaxy S21 aren’t listed, though you can get a quote for the iPhone 11 ($305 for an unlocked, “flawless” 64GB model). Once you complete your order the site will send you a free shipping kit to send out your phone, and you can get paid for the item via PayPal or an old fashioned check.

ecoATM

If you don’t want to have to worry about packaging up your old device and mailing it off, or would like to receive your payout right away, there’s always ecoATM. It’s literally there in the name: an automated machine that you place your device into and it examines the handset and pays you on the spot. It accepts the biggest brands (i.e., Apple and Samsung), along with devices from a wide variety of manufacturers, including LG, Motorola and ZTE. If the machine determines that your device isn’t worth anything at all, you can still use ecoATM to responsibly recycle your old gadget. You’ll find ecoATM kiosks in Walmart stores and malls across the country.

Amazon

While browsing Amazon listings, it’s likely you’ve come across products marked as “refurbished.” Well, if you’ve ever wondered where those come from, a lot of them likely hail from Amazon’s trade-in program. The company will put its own products, like Kindle readers and Fire tablets front and center, but you can also send in phones and gaming products in for an Amazon gift card as well. It’s not great if you want cash, but if you’re looking to upgrade an Amazon device this option is your best bet, as trading in an older device also nets you a 20 percent discount in addition to the store credit.

Apple

This is a good option if you’re looking to upgrade to a newer Apple device. You can trade in iPhones, iPads, Macs and even Apple Watches. That’s notable as wearables are a device category you don’t often see on trade-in sites. Apple will even take your old Android phone if you were thinking of making the switch. The trade-in values are on par with other sites, and you can get your payout in the form of a gift card instead if you’d rather wait before making a new purchase, put it toward media purchases or even just use it in an Apple Store. Which, by the way, also accepts trade-ins in case you’re not comfortable shipping your old but still expensive device.

It’sWorthMore

The nice thing about It’sWorthMore is that its on-site forms handle a larger variety of gadgets than other sites, incorporating companies such as Microsoft, Sonos and even GoPro in addition to standards like Apple, Samsung and Google. You’ll answer a few standard questions about your device’s condition and whether you still have the original box — obviously, the more you’ve kept from the original packaging, the better. You’ll then get a ballpark estimate of its worth and a prepaid shipping label to print out. Once your device is received you’ll generally receive the assessment and payment via check, PayPal or Zelle within two to three business days.

BuyBackWorld

The appeal of BuyBackWorld is that device assessment is a streamlined process: Instead of having to answer a barrage of detailed questions for your device you can just give it a general assessment and let the site handle the rest. Just like with It’sWorthMore, BuyBackWorld will provide a printable shipping label in your confirmation email but, if you don’t have a printer or boxes to pack your device up, you can always have the site send you a free shipping kit, which can handle every gadget the site takes except desktop computers.

GadgetGone

If you’ve read through the other site descriptions, GadgetGone’s modus operandi should be familiar: To sell a product, you’ll have to answer a few questions about what type of device you have and what condition it’s in, after which the site will generate a prepaid shipping label. At least here you can find brands like OnePlus included among the options, and you can also sell MacBooks and Mac Minis here. The site’s biggest gimmick is that you can also send in photos of your pets; you won’t get any additional money but your fur baby (or scaled or feathered friend) may be featured on social media.

Store trade-ins

C1YC8B A GameStop video game store in the Herald Square shopping district in New York gamestop; videogames; shopping; electronic

Sometimes you need your money right now, or just don’t want to trust your device to the vagaries of various shipping companies. There are a few nationwide retailers that accept trade-ins for cash or store credit. Additionally, wireless carriers like Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint will all give you credit toward a new phone.

Best Buy

Best Buy also offers trade-ins both by mail and in-store — with more than 1,000 locations, this might be extremely convenient for you. You fill out the form online and bring that to customer service. It’s easy, but there’s one big downside: You can get your payout only via a Best Buy gift card. This is great if you spend a lot of money with them anyway, but less good if you really need cash.

GameStop

GameStop is infamous for buying games back at ridiculously low prices and flipping them at near retail, but don’t let that stop you from making some quick cash when you need to quickly clear your closet of old electronics and games. And yes, I said cash: GameStop offers store credit, a Visa prepaid card or actual money if you want to take your bounty elsewhere. For example, you can trade in Animal Crossing for the Switch and get $21 in store credit or $17 cash, which isn’t bad when new copies are going for $50 on Amazon. GameStop also accepts phones and connected home devices, though the prices aren’t going to match what you’d get from an online trade-in site.

Consumer to consumer

eBay Introduces Boxing Weekend On Dec. 26 and 27 At Eight Westfield Malls Across The Country, Making It Even Easier For Consumer

Sometimes you prefer to cut out the middleman and get a bit more personal — a transaction where you’re selling your device directly to another person instead of letting a faceless site flip it for you as a “refurbished” unit. In those cases, you want a site that’s more user-to-user, though a few will still automate certain bits to make your sale as smooth as possible.

Swappa

Swappa is a marketplace site, which means sellers can set their own price. So if you’re getting rid of a newer phone, this is probably the best way to go — the iPhone 13 fetches around $729, for example. That’s a huge improvement over what you’d get selling through a site like Decluttr, which is offering only $506 for a 128GB unit.

Amazon

When shopping on Amazon, you’ve probably been tempted by some of those marketplace deals in the past and, chances are, if you list an item on there, someone will give your old device a look. Since almost everyone on earth seems to have an Amazon account, your potential customer base is huge, and it costs only $0.99, plus a percentage based on category, to sell an item through the site. The downsides are that Amazon isn’t really optimized for individual sales; you’ll be competing with wholesale companies and even bots that will tweak the price of a product automatically in response to the competition.

eBay

eBay is sort of the Wild West of sales sites, but the biggest advantage is that you can sell anything there and hopefully find a buyer, regardless of how old a product is. Even so, the site has come a long way in the past decade or so, adding structured categories that can help lead customers to your product — for phones, you can search by network, color or storage capacity, and even filter for features like 4K video or fingerprint sensors.

In the end, it still works as it always did: You list a product and set an end date for the listing with a minimum price, or just set a “Buy It Now” price if you don’t want to wait to see how an auction turns out. Chances are you already have an eBay account with a feedback score, so there’s no extra setup required on your part. Your first 50 listings are free every month, and you’ll pay 10 percent of the purchase price only if an item sells. The biggest downside is that you’re competing with a lot more sellers, and chances are there’s always someone willing to undercut you on price.

Cash-back comparison

Ultimately, the site you go with should be whatever’s most useful and convenient, but if you just care about how much money you’ll end up with, we’ve priced out a few recent flagship handsets just to give you an idea of what each site offers. We’ve also thrown in the Xbox One X, because it might be time to sell yours off and finally upgrade to an Xbox Series X.

All phone prices are for the lowest storage capacity, either 64GB or 128GB. The prices are for the unlocked models when available, or the carrier where it’s being traded. These are only estimates, and were valid the day this post was written. Prices will fluctuate daily or, in the case of sites like Amazon and eBay, hourly.

Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max

Samsung Galaxy S20+ 5G

Google Pixel 5

Xbox One X (1TB)

Decluttr

$446

$292

$287

$190

uSell

$480

N/A

N/A

$120

ecoATM

$265

$140

$90

N/A

Sprint

$330

$225

$205

N/A

Verizon

$338

$288

$195

N/A

T-Mobile

$360

$225

$190

N/A

AT&T

$330

$290

$200

N/A

Best Buy

$380

$275

$250

$200

GameStop

$369 cash / $461 credit

$252 cash / $315 credit

N/A

$188 cash / $237 credit

Swappa

$594

$540

$280

$245

Amazon

$536

$537

$309

$430

eBay

$445

$525

$300

$150

BuyBackWorld

$450

$300

$175

$125

It’sWorthMore

$463

$303

$203

$180

GadgetGone

$465

$335

$290

$160

If you were looking to sell some games, we’ve also got a shorter list, because not every site accepts game trade-ins. GameStop will offer you more money than what’s listed below if you’re a member of its Elite or Elite Pro programs.

Battlefield 2042 (Xbox Series X/S)

Horizon Forbidden West (PS5)

Pokémon Legends Arceus (Switch)

Decluttr

$7.62

$28

$28

GameStop

$1.76 cash / $2 credit

N/A

$26 cash / $33 credit

Amazon

$50

$68

$51

eBay

$10

$46

$53

Once you’ve picked a site and listed your item, there are a few important things to remember before you ship off your device. The most important, when disposing of a phone or laptop or any other device containing personal data, is to do a full factory reset of your device. That also means turning off “Find My iPhone” and the activation lock on iOS devices. See if you can unlock the phone, too; you’ll actually get more money selling a carrier-free device. And finally, make sure you’ve backed up any important data you may have, like contact info, game save data and, of course, photos. Cash is great, but it won’t save your memories.

Images: Mike Blake / Reuters (ecoATM); Alamy (Gamestop); Getty Images for eBay (eBay)

FC Barcelona’s stadium will soon be renamed Spotify Camp Nou

FC Barcelona might be one of the most famous names in soccer, but the club is in bad financial shape. So much so, it couldn’t afford to hang on to talisman Lionel Messi, who moved to Paris St Germain last summer. Overall, Barcelona is in debt to the tune of well over $1 billion. The club’s dire finances are being somewhat alleviated, though, with the help of a new sponsor: Spotify.

The audio streaming platform’s name will replace Rakuten on the front of men’s and women’s team shirts (and replicas that fans buy) as part of a long-term partnership that starts in July. Spotify says it will work with Barcelona to “create opportunities for the iconic shirt to be a space that celebrates artists from across the world.” The team’s famed stadium will be rebranded as Spotify Camp Nou as well. It’s the first time Barcelona has renamed the stadium after a sponsor.

On top of that, as long as the Barcelona Members Assembly approves the deal next month, Spotify plans to draw attention to artists from around the world with the help of Barcelona, “giving a global stage to players and artists at Spotify Camp Nou.” Spotify believes the partnership and worldwide renown of the club will help it “create a new platform to help artists interact with Barcelona’s global community of fans.” More specifics will be announced later this year.

Reports suggest Spotify will pay Barcelona around $307 million over the course of the partnership. Spotify has been criticized for sponsoring Barcelona in a nine-figure deal instead of increasing payouts to artists and supporting them more at a grassroots level.

Shark’s AI Robot Vacuum with Base is $150 off at Amazon

The first day of spring is right around the corner and if you’re looking for some help cleaning up your home, a robot vacuum could do the trick. Even better if you can snag one with self-emptying features, which allow you to basically ignore the robo-vac until you have to clean the base once every month or so. One of our favorites, the Shark AI Robot Vacuum with Base, is $150 off right now at Amazon, bringing it down to $500.

Buy Shark AI Robot Vacuum with Base at Amazon – $500

The AV2501AE model is discounted, which is slightly different than the model we included in our guide (RV2502AE) in that it has a black and bronze design. However, both vacuums share a number of key features including self-cleaning brush rolls that help pick up pet hair, LiDAR navigation, UltraClean Mode, obstacle avoidance, Alexa and Google Assistant support and a bagless, HEPA base. The latter helps Shark’s robo-vac stand out among most of the competition — you don’t have to pay extra for proprietary garbage bags, rather, you simply detach a portion of the base when you need to empty it and then snap it back into place.

In addition to that convenience, Shark’s machine impressed us with its cleaning power and its solid mapping skills. The first thing you’ll have it do is an “Explore Run,” in which it creates a map of your home that you can then label with room names in the companion mobile app. This makes it easy to send the robo-vac to clean only your bedroom when necessary, and you can create no-go zones as well. With a 120-minute run time, the machine can clean a good portion of any home before it needs more juice, and its handy “recharge and resume” feature allows it to power up and get back to cleaning without any additional prompting.

Shark’s mobile app is pretty easy to use as well, and it lets you create cleaning schedules, start jobs from anywhere and activate UltraClean Mode when you need all of the suction power possible to clean up big messes. Overall, it’s an excellent self-emptying robot vacuum that’s competitively priced, especially when discounted like this.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

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ESPN will broadcast NBA action tonight with game-like volumetric video

TV broadcasters are trying all sorts of new tactics to spice up live coverage, including some truly wild things for sports. The NFL made games kid friendly with Nickelodeon-style slime cannons, for example. For tonight’s NBA matchup between the Mavericks and Nets, ESPN is trying something with more universal appeal. The network says that for the first time ever, 3D volumetric video will be used for a live full-game broadcast. 

The project is the result of a collaboration between ESPN Edge, Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution (DMED) Technology teams, the NBA and Canon. The experimental setup uses Canon’s Free-Viewpoint Video (FVV) system with over 100 data capture cameras positioned around the basketball court. The result is a live sports broadcast merged with multi-dimensional footage — something that looks very much like you’re watching a real-life video game. 

While ESPN says this is the first time the technology has been used for a full live production of a sporting event, it has been used before. With their “Netaverse,” the Brooklyn Nets — in collaboration with the NBA, Canon and the YES Network — have used the dimensional footage for replay clips and other post-production content. The Nets are also the first team from any of the four major US pro leagues to utilize the system, first capturing game action with it in mid-January. The clips you see here are from early use of the system, but ESPN said it worked with DMED Technology to build on top of what Canon, the NBA, the Nets and YES had done, making several enhancements so it worked better for live games. The still image above doesn’t really do this justice, so you really need to see the video clips, even in their early form, to get a real sense of what this looks like.

Six separate feeds are sent to ESPN’s control room in Bristol, CT, essentially offering six virtual cameras that are each able to move in three dimensional space to any spot on or around the court. Each feed has a dedicated “camera” operator who controls the view. The alternate broadcast will also have its own production team, as well has dedicated commentators, piping in the natural arena audio from Barclays Center in Brooklyn. ESPN says the broadcast isn’t totally reliant on volumetric video as it can integrate traditional cameras, replays and other content into the 3D environment via a rendered version of the jumbotron. 

Last April, ESPN offered an alternate Marvel-themed “Arena of Heroes” broadcast during an NBA game. While that bent more towards the cartoony aspect of video games, tonight’s effort is more about showing the action with a immersive dimensional quality. The network says the experiment shows new ways emerging technology can be used to offer something beyond what we’re used to seeing on TV, expanding what’s possible for production in the future. 

The alternate broadcast will be available on ESPN+ and ESPNEWS when the Mavericks and Nets tip off at 7:30PM ET tonight. 

You can now draft an email in Google Docs and send it to Gmail

Google might come to your rescue the next time you need to write a carefully-worded email. The company is rolling out a Google Docs update that lets Workspace and legacy G Suite users collaborate on Gmail drafts. Open the email draft template (Insert > Building Blocks > Email draft) and your colleagues can comment or make suggestions. You won’t always need to know recipients’ email addresses, either, as you can mention people by name.

When you’re ready to send the email, you just need to click a button to open a Gmail compose window and finalize the message. Docs will automatically populate all the relevant fields.

The feature will take up to 15 days to reach companies on Rapid Release domains, and will start reaching more cautious Scheduled Release customers on March 22nd. There’s no mention of availability for personal use. At work, however, this could prove very handy — lawyers could use it to produce an airtight email to a client, while marketers might work together on their ideal sales pitch.

Cornell researchers taught a robot to take Airbnb photos

Aesthetics is what happens when our brains interact with content and go, “ooh pretty, give me more of that please.” Whether it’s a starry night or The Starry Night, the sound of a scenic seashore or the latest single from Megan Thee Stallion, understanding how the sensory experiences that scintillate us most deeply do so has spawned an entire branch of philosophy studying art, in all its forms, as well as how it is devised, produced and consumed. While what constitutes “good” art varies between people as much as what constitutes porn, the appreciation of life’s finer things is an intrinsically human endeavor (sorry, Suda) — or at least it was until we taught computers how to do it too.

The study of computational aesthetics seeks to quantify beauty as expressed in human creative endeavors, essentially using mathematical formulas and machine learning algorithms to appraise a specific piece based on existing criteria, reaching (hopefully) an equivalent opinion to that of a human performing the same inspection. This field was founded in the early 1930s when American mathematician George David Birkhoff devised his theory of aesthetics, M=O/C, where M is the aesthetic measure (think, a numerical score), O is order and C is complexity. Under this metric simple, orderly pieces would be ranked higher — i.e. be more aesthetically pleasing — than complex and chaotic scenes.

German philosopher Max Bense and French engineer Abraham Moles both, and independently, formalized Birkoff’s initial works into a reliable scientific method for gauging aesthetics in the 1950s. By the ’90s, the International Society for Mathematical and Computational Aesthetics had been founded and, over the past 30 years, the field has further evolved, spreading into AI and computer graphics, with an ultimate goal of developing computational systems capable of judging art with the same objectivity and sensitivity as humans, if not superior sensibilities. As such, these computer vision systems have found use in augmenting human appraisers’ judgements and automating rote image analysis similar to what we’re seeing in medical diagnostics, as well as grading video and photographs to help amateur shutterbugs improve their craft.

Recently, a team of researchers from Cornell University took a state of the art computational aesthetic system one step further, enabling the AI to not only determine the most pleasing picture in a given dataset, but capture new, original — and most importantly, good — shots on its own. They’ve dubbed it, AutoPhoto, its study was presented last fall at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. This robo-photographer consists of three parts: the image evaluation algorithm, which evaluates a presented image and issues an aesthetic score; a Clearpath Jackal wheeled robot upon which the camera is affixed; and the AutoPhoto algorithm itself, which serves as a sort of firmware, translating the results from the image grading process into drive commands for the physical robot and effectively automating the optimized image capture process.

For its image evaluation algorithm, the Cornell team led by second year Masters student Hadi AlZayer, leveraged an existing learned aesthetic estimation model, which had been trained on a dataset of more than a million human-ranked photographs. AutoPhoto itself was virtually trained on dozens of 3D images of interior room scenes to spot the optimally composed angle before the team attached it to the Jackal.

When let loose in a building on campus, as you can see in the video above, the robot starts off with a slew of bad takes, but as the AutoPhoto algorithm gains its bearings, its shot selection steadily improves until the images rival those of local Zillow listings. On average it took about a dozen iterations to optimize each shot and the whole process takes just a few minutes to complete.

“You can essentially take incremental improvements to the current commands,” AlZayer told Engadget. “You can do it one step at a time, meaning you can formulate it as a reinforcement learning problem.” This way, the algorithm doesn’t have to conform to traditional heuristics like the rule of thirds because it already knows what people will like as it was taught to match the look and feel of the shots it takes with the highest-ranked pictures from its training data, AlZayer explained.

“The most challenging part was the fact there was no existing baseline number we were trying to improve,” AlZayer noted to the Cornell Press. “We had to define the entire process and the problem.”

Looking ahead, AlZayer hopes to adapt the AutoPhoto system for outdoor use, potentially swapping out the terrestrial Jackal for a UAV. “Simulating high quality realistic outdoor scenes is very hard,” AlZayer said, “just because it’s harder to perform reconstruction of a controlled scene.” To get around that issue, he and his team are currently investigating whether the AutoPhoto model can be trained on video or still images rather than 3D scenes.

ESPN’s iOS app adds SharePlay to help you watch sports with friends

You won’t have to invite friends over to share an ESPN sports stream. The network has added SharePlay support to the ESPN app for iOS and iPadOS, letting US viewers watch live and on-demand programming with up to 31 other people. Everyone watching will need either ESPN (via TV Everywhere) or ESPN+ access, but it might be worthwhile to share an exciting shot or questionable referee call in the heat of the moment.

As with SharePlay in other apps, the functionality requires at least iOS 15.1 or iPad OS 15.1. You’ll have to wait until an Apple TV update sometime later in March to use the feature on the big screen in tandem with an iPhone or iPad.

ESPN is relatively late to SharePlay when some services have had the feature since late 2021. Its sibling service Disney+ has had group viewing (albeit using a custom approach) since 2020. This may be one of the more important implementations, however. Live sports are a huge draw for co-viewing features like this, and ESPN’s large audience might introduce SharePlay to many people who otherwise wouldn’t realize it existed.

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Apple iPad Air (2022) review: Almost future-proof

Just a few days before Apple announced the 2022 iPad Air, rumors started swirling that it wouldn’t be powered by the expected A15 Bionic processor that’s in the iPad mini and iPhone 13 lineup. No, it would get an M1, the same chip found in a host of Macs and the iPad Pro, devices that cost a lot more than the iPad Air. At the time, I didn’t put much stock into this rumor; the iPad Air and 11-inch iPad Pro were already extremely similar devices. This would make the gap between them even smaller.

I’ll have to eat crow on this one, as Apple went ahead and put the M1 in the new iPad Air. There are a handful of other little changes here, including a much-improved front-facing camera and 5G connectivity, but the M1 is the real upgrade of note. And while the basic experience of using the Air is mostly the same as it was when we last tested one, having the power of an M1 means this is one of the most future-proof iPads you can buy.

What’s the same?

Apple iPad Air (2022)
Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

The 2020 Air was a total redesign; not so this time. From the outside, the only way anyone will know you’re using the 2022 model is if you have one of the new color options introduced this year. (Apple loaned me a device in a lovely new shade of blue.) Otherwise, it’s exactly the same size and effectively the same weight; Apple’s specs page says it is two hundredths of a pound heavier than the old model, not something anyone would notice. Touch ID is still built into the top button, and it works just fine although I definitely prefer Face ID.

The display is also the same as the last-gen edition, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s a 10.9-inch “liquid Retina” LCD display with Apple’s True Tone feature for optimizing the screen’s color temperature based on ambient light. It’s just perceptibly smaller than the 11-inch screen on my iPad Pro, and the bezel looks a bit chunky, but it doesn’t change the way I use the tablet. It’s clearly not as nice as the mini-LED display on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, but it’s a far better screen than the one on the basic iPad. The main difference between this display and the one on the 11-inch Pro is the latter has the ability to refresh at up to 120Hz, while the iPad Air is stuck at 60Hz. Although I definitely enjoy using Apple’s “ProMotion” screens, I can’t say I noticed much of a difference once I sat down and started using the Air.

Other things that remain unchanged include the price and storage options. $599 gets you 64GB, and you’ll have to pay another $150 to quadruple that storage to 256GB. I wish that the base model came with 128GB, but Apple has to differentiate the iPad Pro somehow. Sixty-four gigs is enough for most people, but if you want to store a lot of videos and games or plan on doing a lot of creative work with it, you’re probably better off just getting 256GB from the jump. As usual, Apple provided us with a top-of-the-line model, with 256GB of storage and built-in 5G.

The back camera, too, is identical to the one from the 2020 Air. It’s a 12-megapixel shooter with a wide-angle lens and no flash. It produces perfectly fine images, but as usual the camera on your phone is probably better in almost any circumstance. Back cameras on tablets have pretty niche use cases, like scanning documents and trying things in AR, and the Air’s camera is just fine for that, but I wouldn’t let it influence your purchase decision.

Apple iPad Air (2022)
Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

Finally, the new Air uses the same accessories as the old model. That means the two first-party keyboard cases Apple offered for the 2020 Air work fine here. Unsurprisingly, the second-generation Apple Pencil that magnetically snaps to the top of the iPad is supported here, too. Meanwhile, the $299 Magic Keyboard remains jaw-droppingly expensive, but it provides a high-quality typing experience for such a compact keyboard. I’ve been happily using it to draft this review and have used it to write plenty of other things in the past. In fact, with the comfortable keyboard and trackpad this accessory offers, I was able to do just about all of my job using the Air. If you’re someone who makes a living writing, it’s a must-have accessory.

The $129 Apple Pencil is an excellent stylus, but I think you really need to know what you’re going to do with it for it to be worthwhile. It’s comfortable to use and extremely responsive, but unless you really want to take handwritten notes with your iPad or have serious visual arts chops, it’s inessential. But there are loads of wonderful drawing and note-taking apps available for the iPad, so if you are an artist, it’s an excellent tool.

Apple iPad Air (2022)

The M1 comes to the Air

Enough about what’s old, though. Let’s get into what’s new here: Apple had the audacity to throw the M1 into the humble iPad Air, a year after putting it in the iPad Pro. This chip also powers machines like the MacBook Air, iMac, Mac mini and 13-inch MacBook Pro. So on the one hand, Apple probably has the manufacturing process down such that getting the chip into the iPad Air wasn’t a major stretch.

On the other hand, this is the kind of flex Apple likes to make with the iPad from time to time. The iPad has very little real competition, and yet Apple just significantly increased the Air’s processing power to an even more impressive level, particularly for this price range.

To drive it home: I ran Geekbench 5 on my iPad Pro, a model that was released about two years ago. It has an A12Z Bionic chip, one that’s only slightly different from the A12X chip used in the 2018 iPad Pro. The M1 in the new Air is significantly faster at both single- and multi-core tasks. The new iPad Air scored 1,706 on the single-core test and 6,966 on the multi-core test. My iPad Pro, meanwhile, only scored 1,113 and 4,149, respectively. This is a testament to how fast Apple has been improving its own chips, because even the A14 in the 2020 Air was a little faster than the chip in my iPad Pro.

What does this mean in practice? The answer depends on what you plan to do with the device. Personally, I use my iPad for writing, web browsing, email and to-do lists, chatting in apps like Messages and Slack, modest photo editing in Adobe Lightroom, playing music and video, and a bit of gaming. None of this taxed the M1 chip in the least — but while the Air beats my iPad Pro in benchmarks, the actual experience of using it isn’t really that different.

That’s more a reflection of my workflow than the power of the iPad Air. The M1 is an incredibly powerful chip for a $599 tablet, and it means that the Air should remain responsive and run whatever apps you want to throw at it for years to come. Or, if you’re the kind of person who plans to do more advanced tasks like editing and exporting video or making music, the Air should more than stand up to your ambitions.

Even with my moderately intense workflow, using an iPad with the M1 chip was a great experience. The Air made short work of any app I tried, including recent Apple Arcade games like NBA 2K22 and Shadow Blade+. I edited a host of RAW photos in Lightroom, and changes were applied almost instantly. I also noticed speedy improvements in more basic tasks where I didn’t necessarily expect it. The Apple Mail app was much faster at deleting all the junk email I get than it is on my iPad Pro, and Safari was quicker to render sites and switch between tabs. Loading different apps into multitasking views like Split View and Slide Over was similarly speedy.

Battery life on the Air is just as good with the M1 chip as it was before. Apple typically always claims any iPad will last about 10 hours, and in this case I think the company undersold the Air’s longevity. In my normal routine, I got close to 12 hours of use before needing to charge the Air, though your mileage will vary depending on what you’re doing. Games took a bigger toll on the battery, but the Air lasted a long time while watching movies. I looped a downloaded movie in the Apple TV app for four hours and the battery only dropped to 75 percent.

Apple iPad Air (2022)
Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

What else is new?

While the M1 chip is the major update here, there are a few other new things to consider. Unsurprisingly, the iPad Air’s front camera has been upgraded to match the one found in the rest of the iPad lineup. It’s a 12-megapixel ultra wide angle camera that isn’t really designed to be used at its full resolution. Instead, it enables Apple’s “Center Stage” feature, which lets the camera zoom in around the subject and continuously move to keep that person (or people) in the middle of the screen. I feel like most people don’t move around a ton when they’re on video calls, but it’s a handy feature nonetheless.

While the camera is definitely better than on the prior iPad Air, it’s still on the left side of the screen when you use the iPad in landscape mode. Having it up top is fine when you’re holding the iPad in portrait orientation, but it’s definitely awkward if you are doing a video call with the tablet attached to the keyboard.

Optional 5G is another unsurprising addition, given that last fall’s iPad mini and the iPad Pro all have it as well. (The entry-level iPad remains stuck with LTE.) This is a logical update that doesn’t change the experience of using the iPad very much. Most people will probably opt to save the $150 and simply get a WiFi-only iPad Air.

Those who get the upgrade, will surely appreciate having 5G as time goes by. Depending on what network you choose and where you live, 5G coverage can still be pretty hit or miss. And I ran a few different speed tests on the iPad Air while running it on Verizon’s network and actually got faster speeds from LTE than 5G. It’s also worth noting that the Air doesn’t support the mmWave 5G networks, like Verizon’s Ultra Wideband network. Those faster networks are only supported on the iPad Pro.

Those caveats aside, there’s no doubt that wireless carriers will increase the availability of 5G networks, so having it on board here is another good piece of future-proofing, much like the M1 chip. That said, it’s not a reason to upgrade your iPad now.

Finally, the iPad Air has USB-C connectivity that Apple says is twice as fast as its predecessor, with data transfer speeds up to 10Gbps supported. The old USB-C connector was already fast, but faster is always better, right? I didn’t do any precision testing, but the iPad Air pulled RAW photos off my SD card extremely quickly.

Apple iPad Air (2022)

Should you buy it?

By now, you probably have the gist of this review: The new iPad Air is a modest upgrade over the previous generation. That’s true, but it’s also damning the Air with faint praise. To be clear, it’s an excellent tablet. It’s extremely fast, has a lovely screen, runs a massive ecosystem of quality apps and will be a capable device for years to come. If I sound unenthusiastic, it’s because this was always true.

It was definitely time for Apple to update the iPad Air, but the company got so much right with the 2020 edition that this new device is a logical improvement to a formula that was already working. As such, anyone who bought the 2020 Air or one of the last few iPad Pros won’t find a ton new or different here. But compared to the 2019 Air, or any base-level iPad from the last few years, the new model is a massive upgrade.

Overall, I think the iPad Air is the best iPad for most people: It’s significantly better than the basic $329 iPad and is nearly identical to the 11-inch iPad Pro that costs $200 more than the Air. If you want a bigger or smaller screen, the iPad mini and 12.9-inch iPad Pro are still great options. But for anyone who wants a premium tablet that’s about as future proof as it gets, the iPad Air is the way to go.