Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Although everyone seems to be worried about the 2 years, I wonder, how long was the IPad 2 sold/supported? Pretty sure it was more than 2 years. Not sure though.

The thing is, many of us who are obsessing over specs, myself included, barely use the current specs. If you only use it for media consumption and web browsing, how 'fast' does it really need to be?

If you 'need' the new features, then IPP is a good choice. If not, it's probably not a good decision.
It's usually the simplest things which irritate me - closing/opening an app. Typing on the keyboard. Scrolling down the screen. These things all start to suffer the older a device is. I've got an iPad 2 on iOS7 still for work and it's an absolute nightmare when using numbers etc to view a spreadsheet.
 
Fair dos! I'm tempted to follow suit but I plan on keeping this iPad for a good few years so am leaning towards the latest tech. I'm not going to use the pen or keyboard. I plan on using the iPad for browsing, gaming, plex and general document editing. Nothing too fancy.
In that case, surely the iPad Air 2 would be more than sufficient, and it will still be useable and relevant in 2-4 years in my opinion.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jbachandouris
In that case, surely the iPad Air 2 would be more than sufficient, and it will still be useable and relevant in 2-4 years in my opinion.
It's the stereo speakers and improved screen which I'm wanting. I had a nexus 9 which had front facing speakers. Was a dream to watch shows on
 
My wife and I both ordered up Apple refurbished IPA2's last night. It's a $300 difference each (128GB LTE) from the IPP9.7. We're coming from Mini 2's and we never had a complaint about them (except we grew out of the small screens). If we didn't grow out of the small screen, we probably would stay with the Mini. They get the newest iOS so we're good with that. We never even had complaint with iOS 9.3 on the iPad Mini 2. It's good for us. The IPP9.7 is definitely nice but we won't use the pencil, we don't use keyboards and our use is browsing (for her) and gaming, browsing, etc. for me. We don't take pics on the iPads and the Safari page caching never bothered us.

For us, the iPhones are a more important upgrade since we always carry them around (and we still have 6 and 6 Plus). We use that for pictures, texts, the phone, etc.
 
Last edited:
I'm honestly surprised at all the people going out and buying iPad Air 2s right now. I expected people who already had an iPad Air 2 to stick with it, but not for people who didn't have one to go out and buy one now.
 
  • Like
Reactions: roop27
I'm honestly surprised at all the people going out and buying iPad Air 2s right now. I expected people who already had an iPad Air 2 to stick with it, but not for people who didn't have one to go out and buy one now.

I think that's probably due to the price drop on the iPad Air 2, and for people who've decided the iPad Pro 9.7" isn't a good deal for the money.
 
It's $620 without a 2 year contract

I was holding out for the 9.7 but will likely go for the Air2. The upgrades of the 9.7 are nice, but to me aren't worth the upcharge over the Air2 for my usage. If I could have gotten the 9.7 with 64gb for $100 less I would, but the additional cost for 128gb plus not having 4gb of RAM for future proofing turned me away.
 
That is a bit misleading as the iPad Air 2 is 3 core where the 9.7" Pro is 2 core. So on multi-threaded applications, which they should all be now ;), the performance difference is much smaller. Also so the 9.7 is under clocked vs the 12.9 which is in these graphs.

iPad-Pro-charts.002.png
On a smartphone very few apps are multithreaded....
 
If I was in the market for a new iPad at the moment I would seriously be considering the Air 2 over the Pro as it seems like a much better deal. Unless you really want the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard (for extra $$) the other differences don't see like enough to warrant an extra $200-250 (depending on how much storage you want). Yes, the A9x is clearly a more powerful CPU (in single threaded performance at least, multi-threaded performance difference is much smaller) but the A8x is still a solid chip and I suspect we've reached a point where high end mobile chips are "good enough" for what most people use them for and most people won't notice a difference in everyday use with newer CPUs. I this case I suspect RAM will become the limiting factor a few years down the road and both have 2 GB.

I think the only other big decision factor is Apple support for the latest iOS version, for which the Pro will likely get an extra year of support over the Air 2.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.