The iPad Air 2 is Apple's sixth-generation tablet, and the sum total of all the company's insight, experience, and engineering to date. It's as narrow as last year's model, yet even thinner and lighter. Its display is as sharp as ever, but now laminated and even better looking. It's got a camera that, for the first time, takes photography seriously. It connects to even faster networks. And it's got a processor that's so advanced and so powerful, it rivals laptops of not so very long ago.
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Hardware Design
Last year, the original iPad Air redefined what it meant to be a full-sized tablet. Narrower and thinner than ever before, that translated directly into a lighter and more usable device. It looked and felt like an iPad mini - one that somehow managed to contain a 9.7-inch display.
Externally, aside from weight and thinness, the iPad Air 2 looks much the same as the original iPad Air, save for the Touch ID sensor integrated into the Home button. There's no curved glass as there was for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, nor is there plastic piping for the radio antennae - the cellular iPad still has a large plastic patch across the top. The iPad Air 2 is still part of Apple's current design language; it's just no longer at the bleeding edge.
Laminated Display
The original iPad Air had a great display. At 2048-by-1536 pixels and 264 pixels-per-inch, it was Apple's third - and best - revision of the iPad Retina panel. It also had an excellent color gamut, including deep, rich reds and purples. What it wasn't, however, was laminated.
Unlike the iPhone, which switched to laminated displays in 2010, the iPad has always had three separate layers for its screen, multitouch sensors, and LCD panel. That created air gaps between the pixels and the glass, and light reflecting off those gaps created screen glare.