Apple iPad (2018) review By The Verge

(upbeat music) - Let's say you wanna buy a tablet and you wanna spend less than, I don't know, call it 500 bucks. Well the obvious option is to get this, the sixth generation iPad that Apple just announced, but what else could you do? I guess there's Windows tablets, but at that price point, they suck. Android tablets, they're basically dead, they don't exist anymore. There's only one Chromo S tablet and who knows if it's any good, I don't think it will be that good. And Amazon tablets are basically only good for watching Amazon Prime and reading Kindle books. So this iPad which starts at $329 isn't just the obvious option, it's basically the only option.

So thank God it's so good. So here's the deal with the new iPad, Apple announced it an education event so you might think it's an education only iPad, but it's basically just the new iPad. And everything about this iPad is almost exactly the same as last year's iPad. It has the same very good screen, but it isn't laminated which means there's a tiny little air gap from the glass to the screen. Unless you're really a pixel pedant, it's not gonna bother you.

It has the same touch ID software, it's got you know, cameras. It does not have the smart connector for attaching a keyboard. It's basically the same iPad that you know and love. Okay so, what's actually new? Well, only two things. One is that it has a new processor the A ten, so it's slightly faster.

And two, it supports this, the $99 Apple pencil. And honestly that's it. I said last year that if you need a new iPad, you should get a new iPad and you should get this iPad because it's an iPad. And that same advice basically holds. If your iPad is old and busted and slow or whatever, go ahead and get this new iPad.

And if it's not, don't, stick with what ya got. So this year the real question isn't is this iPad any good? Because of course it's good, it's an iPad. No the real question is should you spend twice as much to get this thing, the iPad Pro? Well let's look at the differences between these two iPads and see if it's worth it. So the first thing you'll notice is that the iPad Pro has a bigger screen, it's 10.5 inches versus 9.7. But the iPad Pro also has a nicer screen, it has a higher refresh rate, Apple calls it pro motion.

And you can really see it when you scroll really fast, but I don't know, you're not gonna notice it most of the time I don't think. The iPad Pro also has a wider color gamut, and it also has this thing called true tone where it adjusts the color temperature of the screen to the room. Sure that's great, I don't know how important it is to most people. Other iPad Pro differences, it has four speakers instead of just two. So you can hear it in stereo no matter how you're holding it.

It has a smart connector so that you can attach a smart keyboard to it. The iPad Pro also has better cameras and it also has a faster touch ID sensor, fine. But to me the biggest difference is that the iPad Pro has four gigs of ram and the iPad regular old iPad has two gigs of ram. And you wouldn't think that matters, but it does because if you have two apps open in split screen and you bring a third and slide over, on the iPad Pro you can still use the apps in the background. But on the regular iPad if you bring up a third app, the apps in the background freeze and you have to dismiss this top app before you can go back to what you were doing.

If I'm honest I think the only way to justify the extra price of the iPad Pro is if you really know for sure you're gonna use it for full on computer things. If you're gonna be editing movies and editing photos and using it as your main computer and you fully understand all the weird ways that IOS handles files and other like main computer stuff that you wanna do. If you just wanna do tablet stuff, if you wanna watch Netflix and read books and browse the web and play games, then the regular old iPad iPad is gonna be way better for the vast majority of people. Yeah if you can't tell, I really love this iPad. The battery life is great, it's fast, it does everything I want an iPad to do.

But if I'm being honest, I really do think that Apple basically did the bare minimum here. They updated the processor and they added pencil support. There's a lot of stuff on the iPad Pro I wish they had found a way to put here. For example, more speakers. You could listen in stereo in landscape mode if they'd put speakers on this side.

But most importantly I wish that they had added a smart connector on the bottom so you could attach a keyboard to it without having to fuss around with bluetooth keyboards. How much would it have cost to add some of that stuff to this iPad? I don't know, maybe a little, maybe a lot. But I guess if you're Apple, you're looking around the tablet market and you're thinking meh, I might as well keep this thing as cheap as possible so that as many people as possible own iPads. And really that's the lesson with this iPad. Nothing else in the tablet space even comes close to this thing, nothing is as fast, nothing has as many apps or apps that are anywhere near as good.

Really the only competition for this iPad is a more expensive iPad, so why not keep the price low? Are there things that annoy me about this iPad? Yeah, of course, there's dozens of things that annoy me about this iPad. I've mentioned a bunch of 'em in this video. But would I recommend another tablet, one that costs less than 500 bucks, up against this iPad? Absolutely not, there's nothing else out there. Just get this iPad. Do I wish that there was more competition? Sure, I do, but until that happens, I'm just glad that Apple made this iPad as good as they did.

Hey everybody, thanks for watching. You're welcome for me not saying it's an iPad, it's an iPad, it's an iPad 50 million times. But you know what, it's an iPad. If you wanna see more videos about technology please be sure to subscribe to us at YouTube. com/TheVerge.

Source : The Verge