The 11-inch iPad Air M2 drops to a near record-low price on Amazon

Now's the time to grab our top pick for the best iPad you can get right now. An Amazon deal has brought a $100 price cut to the M2-powered iPad Air, so you can grab it for $499. That basically matches the record low of $498 that we saw in the past. The discount applies to all colorways of the 11-inch model, too, so you can pick the one that speaks to your personality the most.

This deal is for the base model with 128GB of storage (double the base storage from the previous gen) and no cellular connectivity, though there is Wi-Fi 6E support. You'll get 8GB of RAM as well.

We gave the M2 iPad Air, which debuted less than a year ago, a score of 91 in our review. It's our pick for the best iPad for most people. It hits the sweet spot between performance, features and price — even more so considering this deal. It offers better future proofing compared with the entry-level iPad, as many features and apps only run on M-series chips and newer A-series ones.

For basic tasks like web browsing and streaming video, performance shouldn't be an issue at all. The M2 iPad Air supports Apple Intelligence features, as well as demanding games like Death Stranding and the Resident Evil 4 remake.

You should get about 10 hours of battery life on a single charge. There's no Face ID here, but a Touch ID fingerprint scanner is built into the power button. One other major positive is that Apple has shunted the front-facing camera to th longer side of the tablet, making FaceTime calls in landscape mode an easier proposition. The M2 iPad Air is compatible with the Apple Pencil Pro, but not the second-gen Pencil.

One of our main complaints about the M2 iPad Air is that it has an LCD display with a 60Hz refresh rate. It's not as smooth or vibrant as the 120Hz OLED you'll find on the most recent iPad Pro. Still, it's a bright, sharp screen. However you slice it, the M2 iPad Air is a pretty great tablet.

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