Best Apple iPads in 2021 (Complete Info). Who needs a Mac when you can have an iPad? If Apple’s rumored new iPad Pro refresh is anything like the 7.9-inch iPad (2017) and 12.9-inch iPad Pro, Apple might be ready to give the MacBook Air, its longest-running and arguably most popular computer line, a serious run for its money. But what would that mean for the iPad line? The original iPad brought us a new category of computing devices, but the second version introduced the second category of comparison. How can an iPad compare to a MacBook?
That question leads us to the problem of judging a product’s potential success based on the competition. With the best Apple iPads, you need to compare it to a Surface, an Android tablet, an iPad Pro, an iPhone, an iPad Air, and the Mac. That’s not a winning set of circumstances, and the only way to get it right is to do a new round of product comparisons. In this article, we’re going to look at what we’d want in an iPad that would come out next year, the year after that, and what we’d be happy if we had one today. Here’s what we’re looking for in Apple’s next iPad.
Why We Want an iPad in 2018
The current crop of iPad Pro tablets is the best Apple iPads in 2021 on the market. While they don’t perform as well as a Mac when running complex tasks like CAD modeling, they’re better than the competition in most other use cases. The iPad Pro should continue to be our choice when deciding on a portable computing device, but to improve our iPad line’s performance and, dare I say, versatility, Apple needs to release a new Pro that offers a major improvement in specs, a major price reduction, and an operating system redesign.
Specs We Want
Every time Apple updates the best Apple iPad Pro, they include new CPUs, GPUs, RAM, and storage. A new iPad should be no different. You can put off the upgrade until a new Macbook Pro (or an iMac), but at some point, it just won’t feel right. The first step to getting a new Pro, however, is to pick out the features you want. If you’re looking to save a few hundred dollars on a big tablet, you can make do with an iPad Air 2 or 2016 iPad or $339 9.7-inch iPad Pro. If you want a premium device that can handle some VR applications or do CAD modeling, Apple needs to bring out a new iPad that can easily outshine the iPad Pro. Further, you can use iMovie on iPads, now available iMovie for Windows.
Improvements Needed for Performance
I’ve written previously about my list of iOS improvements Apple should make, and there are more I wish they’d implement. For starters, Apple needs to remove the iPhone X’s insanely slow Apple Pencil input. Instead of going the external USB-C route, they should just use a completely separate version of the Apple Pencil.
Apple needs to prioritize a processor upgrade in a next-generation iPad Pro. In the past, Apple’s high-end tablets have shipped with the company’s A9X chips (which are still great). Last year, though, the iPad Pro received the A10X, which is a really impressive chip that put it in competition with many laptops. Unfortunately, it seems Apple thinks its current A10X processor is good enough and that a new chip is too expensive.
In addition to a new processor, Best Apple iPads also needs to remove the 32GB model. Since the Best Apple iPads were introduced, the base model has been 16GB. The 32GB model, which now makes up the majority of sales, is rarely sufficient for using a tablet in many ways. This year, Apple raised the price of the base model from 16GB to 32GB without making any notable improvement in speed or performance. With every iOS update, Apple’s speed has only gotten worse. By moving to a 64GB base model, Apple will increase the “good” CPU performance, improve RAM, and keep the tablet cost lower while retaining the “good” performance.
The Last Thing We Want
Besides giving us more performance, Apple also needs to ditch their annoying insistence on ditching the headphone jack. Apple claimed their removal of the headphone jack was for “connectivity,” which is a fancy way of saying they added a proprietary connector to headphones. It would have been much better for Apple to include a USB-C port on the iPad so that audio and charging would be both be moved to a single port.
Going back to my list of iOS improvements, Apple also needs to improve Spotlight search. It has always lagged behind other software like Google Search when it comes to actual results and functionality. It still can’t find movies, books, or songs, and it only searches Google.com. Hopefully, a next-generation iPad will give Spotlight a performance boost, but a larger improvement would be to improve Spotlight search so that it could find more useful things in general.
