 I'm Neelai with The Verge, and this is the new iPad Air. The Air is a complete redesign of the full-size iPad, after three generations of the iconic iPad 2 design. It looks and feels exactly like a large iPad mini, with the same chamfered aluminum frame. But while this design might be familiar, it's still surprising in person. It weighs just one pound, and it's far narrower than previous large iPads thanks to its smaller side bezels. All that adds up to an astonishing reduction in size and weight when you hold it. The hardware feels incredibly premium, but basically fades away as soon as you use it. It's a trick only Apple has really managed to pull off, and the iPad Air is so far ahead of the curve it's almost like the company's showing off. Once you start using the iPad, you're still looking at Apple's excellent 9.7-inch 2048 by 1536 retina display, which remains among the best in the industry. Other tablets like the Nexus 7 and the Galaxy Note have pushed the bar slightly ahead of the iPad's 264 pixels per inch to hit 300 and beyond, but in day-to-day use, they're indistinguishable. Inside, the Air has Apple's new 64-bit A7 chip, which is just ridiculously fast. Apple claims the new chip is up to twice as quick as the old model, and things certainly feel that way. Apps open almost instantly, games are utterly smooth, Safari loads webpages faster than ever, and the whole thing just feels like it has tons of power to spare. Around the back, you'll find the same megapixel camera as the previous iPad, with support for 1080p video recording, and there's a 1.2 megapixel front shooter that's marginally better in low light than the previous model, in case you're really into late-night FaceTime. The only thing you won't find on the Air is the new Touch ID fingerprint sensor from the iPhone 5S, but while the hardware of the iPad Air is pretty close to perfect, the software isn't quite as polished. The Air runs iOS 7, which is Apple's complete redesign of its mobile operating system, and there are several places where it doesn't feel quite finished on the larger screen of the iPad. The app switcher can get fairly confused if you switch between landscape and portrait often, Safari's video player was a bit buggier and crashier in my testing than it's been in iOS 6, and the iBooks app still hasn't been updated for iOS 7, so it's full of fake wood textures. iOS 7 is kind of everywhere now, and it's starting to grow on me just a little bit, but using it on the iPad Air is a reminder of just how quickly Apple was forced to bring it together. A few more updates are definitely in order to polish it up for the iPad. The Air is so powerful and so nice to have around that I want to use it for more and more things, but I can't for a variety of reasons. I'd love to see more power from multitasking, for example. I'd love to be able to use a browser and a chat session at the same time. The iPad lives between a laptop and a phone, but sometimes it feels like the experience is more about stretching phone ideas up than pulling laptop ideas down. All that said, the overall experience of using an iPad is unmatched by any other tablet. Apple's lead in app selection and refinement is so massive that these few iOS 7 glitches seem more like steps sideways than steps backwards. There just aren't games like Infinity Blade on any other platform, and there's nothing like Garageband anywhere else. And the complete iLife and iWork suites are now free, adding to the immediate usability of the iPad. So should you buy an iPad Air? Well, it depends. If you have a fourth generation iPad, I would actually wait a year. The Air is definitely faster, but not by so much that you'll notice in day-to-day use. And next year's Air will probably feature a Touch ID sensor and another performance bump that'll make the outlay worth it. But if you have anything older than last year's iPad, it's a no-brainer upgrade. You'll experience a huge jump in performance, and the massive improvement in size and weight is incredible. And if you're in the market for a new tablet and you absolutely want a larger screen, you should buy an iPad Air. There's nothing better. In fact, deciding between the Air and the new Retina iPad Mini might actually be the hardest choice of all.