Tech

Review: Apple’s $329 iPad is for people who have never upgraded their tablet

Apple doesn’t always build midrange gadgets, but when it does, they’re good.

Andrew Cunningham – Apr 6, 2017 12:00 pm | 229

The fifth-generation iPad. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple isn’t shy about admitting it: the biggest feature of its newest iPad is the price. At $329, it’s $70 cheaper than the iPad Air 2 used to be, $270 cheaper than the smaller iPad Pro costs now, and $170 cheaper than the initial starting price of the iPad back in 2010. It’s a big shift, especially after a year-and-a-half where larger and more expensive iPads were Apple’s main focus.

That’s apparently where the users are. Apple told us that the iPad Air 2 was its most popular iPad, and it had been since its introduction in October of 2014. It was the most popular with enterprises, the most popular with small businesses, the most popular in schools, and the most popular with people who were new to the iPad altogether (more than half of all iPad Air 2 buyers were picking up their first iPad). And even after the introduction of the iPad Mini in 2012 and the big iPad Pro in 2015, the 9.7-inch screen size has remained the most popular of the three.

So one of the $329 iPad’s goals was to replace the aging iPad Air 2 for all of those audiences. Its second goal was to entice the tens of millions of people who bought one of the first four iPad generations or the first iPad Mini to buy an iPad again. Most of those tablets don’t even run iOS 10, and the one that does run iOS 10 lacks support for all of the iPad’s multitasking features and a bunch of other stuff.

But there’s also a third goal Apple didn’t talk with me about, the elephant in the room any time Apple does anything with the iPad: we’re now entering our third straight year of sales decline, both in terms of units sold and in revenue earned. The iPad Pro showed some signs of helping with the problem last year, but none of the iPads Apple has put out since 2014 has halted the product’s downward slide.

This unassuming iPad has a lot of roles to fill. The good news is that it does fill them all, and it does so pretty well. The bad news is that it doesn’t speak very well about any of the extra stuff the iPad Pro brings to the table, particularly the 9.7-inch model.

iPad Air 1.5

Specs at a glance: Apple iPad (fifth generation)
Screen	2048×1536 9.7-inch (264 PPI) touchscreen
OS	iOS 10.3.1
CPU	~1.8GHz dual-core Apple A9
RAM	2GB
GPU	Apple A9 GPU
Storage	32GB or 128GB
Networking	867Mbps 802.11a/b/g/ac, Bluetooth 4.2, UMTS/HSPA/HSPA+/DC‑HSDPA (850, 900, 1700/2100, 1900, 2100 MHz); GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz) CDMA EV-DO Rev. A and Rev. B (800, 1900 MHz) LTE (Bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26, 28, 29, 38, 39, 40, 41)
Camera	8MP rear camera, 5MP front camera
Ports	Lightning connector, headphone jack
Size	9.4″ x 6.6″ x 0.29″ (240 x 169.5 x 7.5mm)
Weight	1.03 pounds (469g) Wi-Fi, 1.05 pounds (478g) cellular
Battery	32.9WHr
Starting price	$329 for Wi-Fi, $459 for cellular
Price as reviewed	$559
Other perks	Charger, Lightning cable

If you’re trying to explain the new iPad (officially dubbed the fifth-generation iPad, picking up the baton that the fourth-generation iPad dropped years ago) to someone already familiar with the lineup, it’s fair to say that its design sits somewhere in between 2013’s iPad Air and 2014’s iPad Air 2. It feels less like a new tablet and more like a second, more conservative crack at updating the first Air.

That’s partly because its design is nearly identical to the original iPad Air. Its size, weight, and general look and feel are all essentially the same with a handful of small tweaks: the mute switch is gone, the chamfer around the edges is now matte instead of shiny, and there’s a Touch ID button on the front now. The two tablets are so similar that Smart Covers and many accessories designed for the first Air are going to work just fine with the iPad 5, depending on how the cases accommodate the small differences in buttons and switches. Covers made for the Air 2 also work with the iPad 5; the 9.7-inch iPad Pro moved the internal magnets around enough that Apple had to change the Smart Cover design for that tablet, but the iPad 5 works perfectly fine with older covers (and new covers will work perfectly fine with your older tablets).

The screen is a mix of new and old. On the one hand, it’s brighter—Apple says it has a maximum brightness of 500 nits, 25 percent brighter than the iPad Air 2. Using a Spyder colorimeter, I measured the brightness of the iPad 5’s screen at around 420 nits with the auto brightness sensor disabled and the brightness cranked to maximum (in many gadgets, the maximum brightness with the auto brightness sensor enabled is higher than the brightness with the sensor turned off, so this shouldn’t be taken as evidence that Apple’s figures are wrong). According to my measurement, the iPad 5 is 16.7 percent brighter than the iPad Air 2 (360 nits), 9.7 percent dimmer than the 9.7-inch iPad Pro (465 nits), and 26.1 percent brighter than the original iPad Air (333 nits).

Brightness aside, the displays on the original iPad Air and the iPad 5 are physically interchangeable. If your iPad Air screen breaks, iFixit says you can even pop an iPad 5 screen into the older tablet and benefit from the brighter panel. We saw the same thing with the iPhone SE’s screen, which is fully compatible with the iPhone 5S and vice versa.

But brightness isn’t everything, and the screen is a step down from the Air 2’s and the Pro’s in a couple of ways. For one, it lacks an anti-reflective coating—the brighter screen helps when you’re using it outdoors or in harsh office lighting, but the difference is noticeable. And the LCD panel and the tablet’s front glass aren’t fused together, meaning that there’s a small air gap between the glass and the display itself. This means that colors pop a little less and contrast is a little lower.

The air gap also contributes to a kind of hollow sound and feeling when you tap on the screen, something that makes the tablet feel cheaper than the Air 2 or Pro. That’s not to say that the iPad 5 (and the iPad Air before it) isn’t well-built, just that it feels less solid than either the Air 2 that it replaces or the high-end iPad Pro or most other devices with laminated screens.

Finally, it’s worth noting a few of the other lines Apple draws between the iPad Pro and the iPad 5:

Performance is a big one, and we’ll explore that in more detail later on.
Aside from not being laminated, the display doesn’t support the DCI-P3 color gamut (or “wide color,” as Apple calls it), though it can still display close to 100 percent of the sRGB color space.
The camera uses the same 8MP sensor as the iPad Air 2, doesn’t include an LED flash, and can’t take wide color pictures.
The Apple Pencil and Smart Connector (and, by extension, the Smart Keyboard) aren’t supported.
The antenna cutout on the LTE models is larger and clumsier looking by comparison.
The Pro has improved speakers on each corner, where the iPad 5 just has them on the bottom.
The iPad 5 has to be plugged in for always-on Hey Siri support to work, which is odd since the A9 ought to have the low-power hardware necessary to make the feature work on battery power (it’s supported in the iPhone 6S). My best guess is that the older iPad Air design’s microphones are somehow insufficient and that Apple didn’t update them in the iPad 5, but Apple wouldn’t fill me in on the details when I asked.

That’s not an insubstantial list, though it’s up to you to decide whether those features are worth an extra $270 to you (the math will get a little easier when the year-old iPad Pro is refreshed, which we’d expect before the end of the year). It’s also worth noting what the iPad 5 can do:

Touch ID and Apple Pay are fully supported.
It’s got 2GB of memory, same as the Pro, which means that all of iOS’ current multitasking features (and, at a minimum, any new ones introduced in iOS 11) are fully supported.
Same screen size, same resolution.
Similar, if not identical, size and weight. It’s a little larger and heavier but there’s nowhere a Pro can go that an iPad 5 can’t go.
Its battery life is really great, which we’ll get to soon.
Its Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and LTE capabilities appear to be broadly identical to the Pro’s.

As of right now, the iPad Pro supports a few extra peripherals and offers a little more speed, but there’s very little it can do that the iPad 5 absolutely can’t. That is simultaneously a great thing for iPad 5 buyers and a sign that the iPad Pro needs to do more to differentiate itself.

Camera

Apple has an 8 megapixel camera sensor that it uses in a lot of its cheaper products (and in products where the camera isn’t as vital to the experience as it is in, say, the iPhone). So far, it’s appeared in the iPad Air 2, the sixth-gen iPod Touch, the iPad Mini 4, the 12.9-inch version of the iPad Pro (but not the 9.7-inch version, which uses the 12MP sensor from the iPhone 6S) and now the iPad 5. One pleasant side effect for camera-bump haters: the lesser camera sits flush with the body of the tablet.

Apple confirmed to us that it is indeed the same camera and sensor, but compared to all of those older products it should still benefit somewhat because of the improved image signal processor (ISP) in the A9. Video stabilization, noise reduction, and tone mapping should all be slightly improved; in our sample low-light photos especially, the improvements are subtle but visible. If you’re coming from a 5MP iPad Air camera or anything older, it’ll be a good upgrade.

Performance

The iPad 5 uses the Apple A9 SoC originally introduced in the iPhone 6S a year and a half ago (it’s also present in the iPhone SE). Its dual-core CPU is the same architecture as what Apple uses in the iPad Pro’s A9X, just clocked a bit lower: 1.8GHz compared to around 2.1GHz in the 9.7-inch Pro and 2.25GHz in the 12.9-inch Pro. The A9 has about half the GPU clusters that the A9X has—Anandtech reports that the A9 uses six clusters and the A9X uses 12—and it’s got a 64-bit memory bus compared to the A9X’s 128-bit bus.

Unsurprisingly, the year-old iPad Pro manages to significantly outperform the iPad 5, but the numbers look pretty good as a replacement for the iPad Air 2. The A8X in that tablet had three CPU cores, which means that apps that can use all three cores at once will perform about the same on the iPad 5 and the Air 2. But the A9 has significantly better single-core performance, useful for tasks (like browsing) that can’t easily be multithreaded. As a result things should be just a bit faster in general on the iPad 5, though it’s not a night-and-day difference compared to the Air 2.

The A8X’s GPU also used more GPU clusters (8) and a wider 128-bit memory bus, but the A9 offsets that by using a newer GPU architecture and faster LPDDR4 RAM. As a result, the iPad 5 just barely edges out the Air 2, though again it’s not exactly leaving the older tablet in the dust.

Going with the A9 was a sound decision. It’s not dramatically faster than the A8X in most ways, but it’s not slower either. On Apple’s end, it probably saves money to put in an order for more A9 chips (already used in a bunch of other devices) than it is to continue to pay for A8X chips, which are both physically larger (and thus more expensive) and only used in the iPad Air 2.

And a final note on memory: 2GB of RAM still feels like a good amount when you’re using iDevices. You get all the multitasking stuff and don’t have to deal with too much tab reloading in Safari or delays when launching apps. The only iDevices with more memory at this point are the iPhone 7 Plus (3GB) and the big iPad Pro (4GB), so developers are probably going to be designing for and testing on 2GB iDevices for a good while yet. It should be reasonably future-proof.

Using the iPad 5 feels good. Apps open and become responsive quickly, whether you’re in multitasking mode or not. The iPad Air 2 still feels snappy, and the iPad 5 is definitely comparable. It’s not Apple’s best-performing tablet (and if an iPad Pro with some kind of A10 or A11 chip comes out in the next few months, that gap will widen further), but there’s really not much it can’t do.

Battery life

The iPad 5 has a bigger battery than the iPad Air 2 and the A9 should be more power efficient than both the Air 2’s A8X and the original Air’s A7. That’s a recipe for better battery life, and even though Apple lists the same numbers for all of its tablets—around 10 hours of browsing on Wi-Fi and 9 hours on cellular—the iPad 5 is a dramatic improvement over the Air and Air 2 and even edges out the smaller iPad Pro. All of these numbers are taken from new or refurbished tablets with fresh batteries and either iOS 10.2 or 10.3, so they should be directly comparable.

My only question here, and one Apple wouldn’t directly answer, is why Apple rates all its tablets for 10 hours of runtime when some are clearly better than others. There’s a similar divide between the $1,499 MacBook Pro and the more expensive Touch Bar model; the $1,499 Pro has a larger battery and a lower-power CPU and GPU, and that’s reflected in our battery life tests, but not on Apple’s product pages.

Amazing for upgraders

This is the best upgrade iPad Apple has ever released. The company acknowledges that there are still plenty of people out there using the first four iPads and the original iPad Mini for basic stuff, even though most of that old hardware isn’t even supported by iOS anymore. If that describes you, Apple made this tablet to make you want to upgrade.

Let’s say you bought an iPad 2 when it was new. It was an incredibly popular model, Apple sold it for a long time, and it runs iOS 9.3.5 so you still probably haven’t encountered too many basic apps that just straight-up refuse to run. Assuming that you sprung for the $499 16GB base model, here’s what the iPad 5 does for you for $170 less:

Sharper, brighter, and more colorful Retina screen.
Weighs about a third of a pound (136g) less.
Somewhere between eight and ten times faster (using an iPad 2 with iOS 8 or 9 installed was never fun).
Four times the RAM.
Double the storage.
iOS multitasking.
Current iOS updates and the promise of many years of updates to come.

And that ignores things like battery degradation, cracked screens, and normal wear-and-tear that any gadget is going to run up against as it ages. That’s a pretty long list of stuff, and you get it for a lot less than you paid for your first iPad back in 2011.

Here’s the short version: if you have the second or third-generation iPad (is it even possible to keep using the first-generation model and iOS 5 anymore?), this is a great value, and the speed difference alone is going to be night-and-day. Even if all you do is e-mail, browse, and Netflix, your experience will be a ton better, and you won’t be left open to security flaws in an outdated OS.

If you have a fourth-generation iPad you use regularly, I’d still strongly recommend an upgrade. That iPad runs iOS 10 and should still feel OK for a lot of tasks, but it’s very likely that it won’t get updates after iOS 11 comes out in the fall. The iPad 5 is still noticeably faster and lighter, which is especially nice for one-handed use.

If you have the first iPad Air, only get the iPad 5 if you’re really curious about the iOS multitasking stuff or if you regularly run into slowdown when you use certain apps. Those tablets are starting to show signs of age, but they still run fine and still have a couple years of updates left in them; even assuming the two-year refresh cycle that Apple increasingly seems to use for non-flagship products, you ought to be able to hold out for whatever eventually replaces the iPad 5.

And if you have an iPad Air 2, this is a step sideways, and offers no compelling reasons to upgrade since it doesn’t support the Apple Pencil or the Smart Connector. Next-generation iPad Pros might give you something to upgrade for—the rumored 10-inch redesign of the smaller Pro plus a speed and RAM bump would go some way toward giving you a reason to upgrade that isn’t the Apple Pencil—but right now your tablet still has a lot of useful life left in it.

Thoughts on the iPad Mini, which is the new Mac Mini

Since its introduction in 2012, the iPad Mini has always been the cheapest way to buy into the iPad family. That’s no longer true—the year-and-a-half-old iPad Mini 4 still costs $399, $70 more than the iPad 5.

That’s an intentional move on Apple’s part. It could have made the Mini 4 cheaper when it announced the iPad 5, but instead the company opted to increase the storage from 32GB to 128GB and eliminate the 32GB model, keeping the price the same. It also eliminated the iPad Mini 2 that had served as the lineup’s base model for a couple of years. The 128GB version of the iPad 5 is just a bit more expensive than the Mini 4 at $429, but it’s also a whole lot faster.

It’s hard to say what this means for the ultimate fate of the iPad Mini. But since Apple started making bigger phones, the little tablet has been on the back burner. The current pricing and positioning suggests that the only people really buying the Mini are willing to make other compromises for the sake of having a small tablet, and that there aren’t a whole lot of people who choose to make that trade-off. Like the Mac Mini, it will probably continue to soldier on, but also like the Mac Mini, Apple will pay attention to it only sporadically and it will never really be a priority to keep it updated.

An iPad built to resuscitate a shrinking market

The fifth-generation iPad. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The new iPad is a departure from Apple’s usual strategy. It slightly increased the size and weight of the tablet and removed a couple of the features of its direct predecessor in order to hit a price point. That’s a radical departure for a company typically looking to go with its newest and best tech.

In that way, the iPad 5 feels like it comes from the same place as the iPhone SE—it’s an admission that sometimes when you really want to address the middle of the market, you need to build a product to do so rather than just keeping old stuff around indefinitely (hello, MacBook Air). The iPad Air 2 is still the better tablet in some ways, but in all the ways that count the iPad 5 is a great replacement for it.

The $329 iPad is both a smart move and an acknowledgement of the realities of the shrinking tablet market. Long upgrade cycles are a common explanation for three years of falling sales, and this update is purpose-built to lure in anyone using anything older than an iPad Air 2. It removes features and it’s missing things that the Pros have, but if you’re still watching Netflix on an iPad 2 or 3, if you’re using an iPad as a cash register, or if you’re just buying a bunch of tablets to put in a classroom, you already don’t care about that stuff. What’s important is that this tablet costs about half of what your last iPad did, which makes it easier to pull the trigger on an upgrade (or your first-ever iPad) than when the only new iPads being released cost $600-and-up. And it does everything that a modern iPad is capable of doing, short of supporting the Apple Pencil.

The good

$329 is a very good price for what you get (and it’s a more realistic price for a midrange tablet in 2017).
Feels fast.
Apple Pencil and Smart Connector aside, it can do everything an iPad Pro can do.
Good battery life.
iOS’ tablet app ecosystem is still mostly healthy—the same things that Apple tells developers to do to support large-screened iPhones also typically makes apps work well on tablets.
Camera is fine (for an iPad).
Seriously, $329. It’s the tablet’s killer feature, for better or worse.

The bad

No anti-reflective coating on the glass.
Air gap between front glass and LCD panel makes the screen look less colorful and contrasty, and the tablet feels weirdly hollow when you’re tapping on the screen.

The ugly

Exposes just how little the 9.7-inch iPad Pro does to earn its “Pro” label.

Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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