iPad Air Takes On Every iPad Ever Made

In the battle for speediest tablet, there can be only one victor. In our side-by-side tests of every single full-sized iPad generation ever made, not surprisingly, the Apple iPad Air makes a strong case for supremacy. Since Apple introduced the iPad in 2010, it's been continually upping the ante on its processor. The very first iPad featured a custom-built A4 mobile CPU, which ran at 1 GHz. The iPad 2 got an upgrade to the more powerful A5 chip. It, too, was clocked at 1 GHz.

But, as with all Apple's ARM-based chips, the performance was more than the sum of its Hertz. When the iPad 3 came along, it included a huge graphic performance boost, thanks to the A5x chip. The A6, which arrived with the iPhone 5, added performance and new digital photography chops to the phone and the iPad 4, which arrived in November of 2012.

This year brought the A7 chip and a new set of iPhones and iPads. The 1 lb., .29 inch iPad Air not only looks and feels different, it performs differently too.

To see the real-world changes wrought by Apple's component updates across the five generations of iPad, we put them all in one room and performed a series of simple, illustrative tests. The iPad Air is on the far right. Next to it is the iPad 4 Retina, followed by the iPad 3, then the iPad 2 and, finally, the heftier iPad 1.

Caution: watching this video may lead to standing in line for the iPad Air line at your local Apple store Friday.

Image: Mashable