Apple iPad (5th-gen)

Apple’s Tablet Looks Back To Go Forward, With New Components In An Older Chassis – But A Solid Price Cut Keeps It The Ideal Tablet.

This iPad is the most exciting boring update to a product we’ve ever seen. It replaces the iPad Air 2 at the lower-price end of Apple’s 9.7-inch tablet range, and doesn’t include any new tricks, features we’ve never seen before, or anything like that. What it does is take T3’s number one tablet, make it a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper, and give it even better battery life. It’s more of the same, and when the same sits at the top of our Elite list, we’re good with that.

These upgrades come with a surprising downside: it’s thicker and heavier than the iPad Air 2. It’s pretty weird to see Apple add bulk to a product, but this iPad is the same 469g weight and 7.5mm thickness of the original iPad Air. That’s a weight increase of just 32g, and a more noticeable 1.4mm thickness. While we admit to being kind of obsessed with our tech being the smallest, thinnest designs possible, even we have to admit that this is… fine, really.

So that’s the one really obvious downside, and even that comes with a bonus, in that this has a bigger battery than the Air 2 – and, in fact, bigger than the 9.7-inch iPad Pro. Which is especially interesting when you pair it with the new processor, which is an Apple A9, as seen in the iPhone 6s. It’s not, you’ll note, the beefier upgraded A9X version, which is what the iPad Pro models run.

LITTLE AND LARGE