Strong disagree. All the iPads up until the iPad 4 were pretty garbage.
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8GB iPad Prototype from 2011 Reveals Apple's Scrapped Budget Model
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Disagree. The iPad 2 was a sales legend with a beefy A5 to handle the non Retina display with aplomb. CPU twice as fast as the OG. It was amazing stuff. My grandma got one for her 80th birthday to watch all her encoded movies and it was on her bed when she passed at 88.
the "board" was important as each one was unique so if photos leaked Apple was able to tell who had leaked the photo...
If I remember right, the iPad 3 had the light bleeding issue, which, thanks to this site, I got free replacements from Apple. lol
Yep... https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/backlight-bleed-and-uniformity-issues-with-the-ipad-3.1343851/ LOL.
Found my old pic too! Hah!
I actually remember this thread because I went through something similar. I think that the iPad 3 might have been how I ended up on Macrumors. The screens on this thing were terrible. And it was funny to read all of the comments telling people that there was nothing wrong. I can’t remember how many of these I tried before calling it quits. None of them were any good unless you ignored all of the glaring screen errors like weird tints of all colors, backlight bleeding, dead and stuck pixels, and badly uneven brightness. I also had one with dust under the screen and I remember reading about someone who had a hair under the screen. 😂
Haha, you mean this thing?
I love how the top comment is "Just looks like a giant iPod touch. Nobody is going to buy that thing." and they've been AFK since 2013. Meanwhile I think Apple has sold at least 800 million iPads since 2010.
Or when everyone was saying that nobody would want a big phone and now we have the iPhone Pro Max. And how a couple of years ago everyone was saying that foldable phones were ridiculous but now that Apple is working on one, lots of people can’t wait to line up and get it.
I remember the iPad 3 all too well, especially since about half a year later, the new one came out..
Such device would be the dream of all tech giants today, but even a tiny bit of unstable internet connectivity could render the device unusable or locks up. Also, you definitely don’t want to be in a scenario where you need to call 911 right now but your storage-less iPhone lost the connection and frozen, unable to even launch the phone app.
Also, removing storage chips altogether won’t save much money if that’s a concern. As for the bandwidth, you might have a burst of data transfer topping at 1Gbps for 5 min, but it would be ridiculous if the infrastructure has to maintain lets say 5000 Gbps, 24*7 because there are 50k iPhone users nearby, all downloading lots of stuff.
Oh and let’s not forget the coverage is abysmal in remote areas regardless of the country you are in, unless the country is quite small like Singapore.
That wasn't a budget model. 8GB of storage would have been a total con for users who bought it. Glad Apple decided to pass on it.
Considering he died in 2011, I wonder if scrapping this was one of Steve Jobs final calls before he moved on from this realm...
Considering he died in 2011, I wonder if scrapping this was one of Steve Jobs final calls before he moved on from this realm...
I was in the same boat. I had an iPhone 4 at the time and knew retina was coming. Held out on the iPad 2 for ages and got the 3. I was so dirty when the 4 came out only a few months later.
Omg, i remember my first ipad being the 3rd gen. It was awful! From memory it ran okay for the time but living in the UK i never got 4G as Apple limited the iPads to an LTE band that wasn’t used much if at all across the UK. So i paid for 4G but never got the service (restricted to 3G) and its battery sucked and took a decade to charge. Given it was the first ipad to have a retina display it needed the beefier battery but for some reason Apple didn’t think to increase charging speeds to compensate. Terrible device!
Disagree! I *still* have an iPad 2 in my workshop at home that I watch MLB on in the summer and fall. The MLB app is an older version, but still works. For some reason it can pick up the wi-fi from the house, at about 150 yards away, when nothing else can.
The MLB app is the only thing I use on it, so I've never bothered upgrading it and I have no use for an iPad otherwise.
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Based on what I’m reading here, I must have gotten lucky with my iPad 3. Screen was perfect, and it worked great. I don’t remember any lag or issues whatsoever. Used it from summer 2012 until some time in 2017, worked perfectly the whole time. I mean it started to slow down a bit in that last year but that always happens with 5-year-old devices.
iPad 2 is a unique sweet spot between improved specs and reduced requirements (non-retina, slimmer os, simpler apps). My MIL used one for some sheet music app up until about a year ago, when the battery finally started swelling. 12 years of life out of a tablet is about as good as it gets.
Not to be that guy, but the iPhone 5c was also available with 8GB (sadly...) from September 2014 until September 2015 for cheaper phone carrier contracts. I remember a few of my friends having that model and hating how cramped the iPhone felt... If Apple knew that the iPad couldn't survive at 8GB in 2012, why did they give the lower-tier iPhone 8GB in 2014? 
Yeah, most people don't know what they want and if innovators didn't push the envelope everyone would be content to be stuck with the same thing forever. We're moving towards foldable phones now because we're to the point where you just really can't make the phone any bigger and still be very useable or pocketable even for men. And to be fair a lot of the early foldable phones did suck and had a lot of durability issues. I'm still not sold on the fold. Spending $2000 on a phone seems kinda crazy. I'm more interested to see what Apple can do with a flip phone fold form factor which will be more reasonably priced.
I'd probably buy an 8gb iPad now, if it was cheap enough to justify.
We use iPads at my church as single use check-in apps. They only ever run 1 app... So if I could get a basic iPadOS (Without all the default junk like mail/calendar/news etc...) that just runs one app.. That would be worth it if the price was right..
We use iPads at my church as single use check-in apps. They only ever run 1 app... So if I could get a basic iPadOS (Without all the default junk like mail/calendar/news etc...) that just runs one app.. That would be worth it if the price was right..
I don't get the need to push the phones bigger. I wish the 17 pro was actually a little bit smaller. I think the sweet spot was the iPhone X at 5.8"
Too late. It seems some mobile websites are already favouring 6"+ screen sizes in 2025, so that 6" has now become the effective minimum practical size going forward.