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The Black Friday deals event is fast approaching, and ahead of the shopping season, Apple has released a colorful new iPad 10.9 (2022).
Offering a major iPad hardware overhaul, is the new iPad a facelift that makes it one of the best iPads around, or should you go for the previous-generation iPad 10.2 (2021)? If you can find a great Black Friday iPad deal, we recommend checking out what else Apple has to offer.
The iPad remains the dominant force in tablet computing. No matter which model you buy—check out our list of the best iPads to see which slate is best for you—you’ll be buying apps, games, and services from the iPadOS ecosystem. With that in mind, the tenth generation iPad is more similar.
In terms of hardware, it’s more powerful than the ninth-generation iPad 10.2 (2021) thanks to the A14 Bionic chip, but you won’t notice much of a difference in real-world performance. The A14 Bionic was already powerful enough.
The biggest change is the overall design. There’s no home button, instead the TouchID fingerprint scanner is buried in the sleep/wake button on the side. This removes the last home button from Apple’s iPad lineup, leaving only the iPhone SE (2022) with the old feature.
This allows for much thinner bezels and rounded corners, and it certainly gives the iPad a modern look closer to the latest iPad Air and iPad Pro. The original iPad even added USB-C over its predecessor’s slower Lightning connector — but the decision to get one isn’t a slam dunk.
iPads are going up in price
This is largely due to Apple’s insistence on breaking up the iPad’s pricing structure in order to move away from the long-standing “magic number” of $329 in the US. With simple upgrades, the iPad now starts at $449 / £499 / £749. There’s also the company’s reluctance to ditch the Apple Pencil First Generation, which is currently only available for the base iPad model.
The other issue is that the new pricing further distorts the iPad product lineup. For $50 / £70 more than the basic iPad (they’re the same price in Australia), you can pick up an iPad mini and get unlimited portability and a tablet that uses the second-generation Apple Pencil (not that). requires a new USB-C adapter for charging).
In fact, for $150 / £160 / AU$180 more than the basic iPad, you can get an iPad Air with an M1 chip that’s so future-proof that even Apple hasn’t worked out what to do with it. Unlike the iPad 10.9 (2022), the M1-powered iPad Air will have all of the upcoming iPadOS features, such as external display support. The iPad Air also uses the latest Apple Pencil second generation.
This iPad 2022 is not worth buying; It’s hard to find where in the product line it needs to be overwritten. The elephant in the room with the shopping bag – the iPad Mini, iPad Air and iPad 10.2 (ninth generation) – are more likely to receive discounts in the coming days as early Black Friday deals start rolling in, so we definitely recommend getting hold of them.
Amazon currently has the best iPad deal in the US (opens in new tab) we found: save $30 on a ninth-generation iPad, bringing it down to $300 (scroll down to see the best iPad deals, wherever you are).
Packed with notebook-grade M1 chips, the iPad Air can also be found as an Amazon deal (opens in new tab) At $519, it’s only $60 more than the base version of the 10th generation iPad. This makes the Air a much more attractive purchase option than the latest iPad, as it offers much more power with the same size display.
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