Apple maintains its tradition of avoiding Black Friday deals on their own retail website while quietly liquidating inventory through Amazon with more generous discounts than previous years. At $449, down from $599, this 11-inc 128GB/WiFi iPad Air (M3 chip) joins Apple discounting spanning MacBooks, AirPods, Apple Watches, and iPads. The only product category notably absent from Amazon’s Black Friday Apple selection remains the iPhone 17 series, which still hasn’t launched on Amazon’s platform despite being available through carriers and Apple directly. This 25% discount on the iPad Air represents a record-low price for Apple’s mainstream tablet that balances capability with accessibility.
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Between the Basic iPad and the Pro Models
The basic iPad costs about $329 and comes with an A14 chip from the previous generation and a standard Retina display, and it’s for people who want a cheap device for browsing and basic productivity. The M3 chip in the iPad Air gives it a lot more processing power because it has desktop-class architecture that can handle demanding games and creative applications that would be too much for the basic model. The Liquid Retina display with P3 wide color and True Tone is better than the basic iPad’s display because it has more colors, better viewing angles, and adaptive white balance.
The iPad Pro positioned above the Air commands $800+ through M4 chip, mini-LED ProMotion displays reaching 120Hz and Face ID replacing Touch ID. Professional photographers, video editors, and digital artists justify Pro pricing through workflow advantages including ProRes video recording, LiDAR scanning, and reference-quality displays. But most users find the Air’s M3 chip provides more than adequate performance for typical tablet workflows and the $350+ savings compared to iPad Pro base models enables purchasing Magic Keyboard or Apple Pencil accessories for instance.
The M3 chip made for Apple Intelligence has an 8-core CPU and a 10-core GPU architecture that makes it almost as powerful as a desktop computer. When you edit videos in iMovie or LumaFusion, the effects happen in real time and the timeline scrubbing is smooth.
The 11-inch Liquid Retina display has a resolution of 2360 x 1640 at 264 PPI which makes individual pixels impossible to see. The P3 wide color gamut shows more colors than the standard sRGB display, and it makes colors that look washed out on other displays stand out more in photos and videos. The ultralow reflectivity coating keeps the screen visible outside where glossy screens wash out completely. The True Tone technology changes the white balance based on the lighting around you to make it easier on your eyes when you use it for a long time.
Stage Manager is one of the features of iPadOS that makes real work possible: It lets you create resizable and overlapping app windows like those on desktop operating systems instead of forcing you to switch between apps in full screen. Support for external displays makes the workspace bigger by adding monitors, and Scribble turns handwriting into text wherever you can type.
At $449, the iPad Air 11-inch is the best value for money iPad you can get during Black Friday. If you need tablet computing with good performance, this record-low price makes Apple’s mainstream iPad accessible without compromise.
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