I bought an iPad Air 5 at the Apple Store in Seattle last night. I immediately noticed this creaking issue out of the box. Tried to convince myself it was in my head. It wasn't – I even compared it to my iPad Air 4, which definitely didn't have this issue. Must have been a bad one, I thought to myself.
This morning, I went back to the Apple Store and swapped it for another iPad Air 5. Got home, opened it up. SAME ISSUE! Okay, this time, I went and started searching around the Internet to see if others had this problem. It's been noted on MacRumors, 9to5Mac and other sources (I'll drop some links in below). I wasn't gonna spent $1k on a product that sucked that bad.
Tonight, I went back ONE MORE TIME to the Apple Store (my second trip of the day!) and returned it. This time, I swapped it out for an iPad Pro, which LO AND BEHOLD didn't have this issue, and I paid the difference out of pocket. Overall, I am not happy with this transaction in general and I will be far more skeptical of Apple's build quality QA in the future.
This is a real issue and I hope that Apple addresses it for the folks who are experiencing it over the long term.
Some links (there's a lot more folks running into these issues):
[Link Edited by Moderator]