iPad Air and iPad mini 2019 review: Apple’s tablets strike an ideal balance

These are clearly more appealing to most people than Apple's 2018 iPad or iPad Pro.

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[Prestige]

I'm not sure the A12 with 3GB of RAM will necessarily get updates for longer than the A10X with 4GB of RAM.

The day will come when Apple drops support for anything without a Neural Engine.

That does worry me and still keeps me undecided whether or not I should buy the 10.5 Pro or the 2019 Air.

 

[Prestige]

The benchmarks are great but one major iPad model is missing : the 2017 10.5" Pro that the new Air is mostly based upon.

I wouldn't normally include a product in the benchmarks that is both no longer part of the current lineup, nor a device a reader is likely to be considering upgrading from. But the refurb store/aftermarket is kind of an edge case.

I'll share them with you here though... here are all the benchmark slides with the 2017 iPad Pro included. That said, just note that these results are from our benchmark database and were done in iOS 10.13.2, not iOS 12.2, which could have an impact. (I don't have a 2017 iPad Pro to test presently, I'm sorry.)

Geekbench single-core: https://meincmagazine.com/wp-content/uplo ... ingle.jpeg
Geekbench multi-core: https://meincmagazine.com/wp-content/uplo ... multi.jpeg
Geekbench Compute: https://meincmagazine.com/wp-content/uplo ... mpute.jpeg
GFXBench Metal: https://meincmagazine.com/wp-content/uplo ... Metal.jpeg
Browser (Octane): https://meincmagazine.com/wp-content/uplo ... ctane.jpeg
Browser (Kraken): https://meincmagazine.com/wp-content/uplo ... raken.jpeg

Thanks Samuel, that's very interesting data. Thanks for providing the updated graphs.

With the caveat that the 2017 Pro was tested on a different version of iOS, the new Air beats the Pro 10.5 by a healthy margin in most tests, losingout only in OpenCL, and the memory tests (likely due to the Pro's extra RAM, but it's close)

I guess it shows that the gains in processor more than offset the small reduction in RAM, and the new Air is likely the better machine for most people. Unless you really want the 120Hz display and 4 speakers.

Well, the 2017 beats the new Air in GPU related tests while the Air beats the old Pro in CPU related benchmarks.