Apple iPad (2017)
Not the tablet of our dreams, but a keen price and bags of power mean it’s the best you can buy for less than £500
The new iPad surprised us when it was announced in March. We were all expecting the iPad Air 3; instead came a weird hybrid of the original iPad Air and the iPad Air 2.
That sounds like it should be bad news, and in some ways it is. This new iPad is both fatter and heavier than the iPad Air 2 (which it replaces) and the screen isn’t quite as nice. On paper, the new iPad has a less capable processor as well.
The huge caveat is that the new iPad is considerably cheaper than the iPad Air 2. At £339, it knocks a full £60 off the price, and you also get double the storage at 32GB. If you need more, the 128GB version costs £429, while the 4G version costs £469 for the 32GB model and £559 for 128GB. That makes the new iPad Apple’s cheapest tablet. It even undercuts the £419 iPad mini, and is £60 cheaper than the Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S2 – not to mention £261 cheaper than the S3 ( opposite).
There’s nothing bad to say about the look and feel of the new iPad. It’s built from metal and glass and is available in three different colours – silver, “space grey” and gold – all of which look great.
The physical layout follows a familiar pattern. At the front, the iPad’s 4:3 Retina-class 2,048 x 1,536, 264ppi display dominates affairs, with a Face Time HD 720p webcam above it and a fingerprint reader/home button in the centre below the screen. The top edge hosts a 3.5mm headphone jack and the power button; the volume buttons are on the right edge near the top; and for charging, data transfer and sync, there’s a Lightning port in the centre on the bottom edge.
You don’t get the Smart Keyboard connector on the left long edge as you do with the iPad Pro, but there’s still a series of magnets here that allow you to quickly attach and detach Apple’s range of folding iPad covers. Despite the increase in size and weight over the iPad Air 2, you won’t notice the difference unless you’re holding one in each hand. Sling the new iPad in your bag and you’ll barely notice it’s there at all. The new iPad’s display isn’t as good as the iPad Air 2’s nor the iPad Pro 9.7’s. It doesn’t have the same anti-reflective coating as those tablets, and there’s a visible air gap between the LCD panel and the glass above it where those other tablets have laminated displays. That makes for a less vibrant image that doesn’t look quite as immediate. That’s not to say it’s a poor display. Maximum brightness reaches a heady 520cd/m2, and although the
“At £339, the new iPad knocks a full £60 off the iPad Air 2’s price, and you also get double the storage at 32GB”
contrast ratio is a rather disappointing 861:1, Apple has tweaked things so it reproduces 96.5% of the sRGB colour gamut. As a result, colours are well balanced and highly accurate.
Apple’s Night Shift, which reduces the amount of blue light emitted by the screen in the evening and at night, makes a reappearance here, but there’s no True Tone – as introduced on the iPad Pro 9.7 – to adapt the colour temperature of the display to match ambient conditions.
Performance is another area where the new iPad differs from previous iPads. The headline is the use of the Apple A9 processor, as used in the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. This isn’t as powerful on paper as the iPad Air 2’s A8X processor, but it is more accomplished than the Air’s dualcore, 1.3GHz A7 processor.
The new iPad feels perfectly responsive to swipe and pinch-zoom gestures, and there’s little to no slowdown in advanced iOS games such as Asphalt 8: Airborne.
In benchmarks, the iPad performed better than expected. It’s faster overall than both the iPad Air and the iPad Air 2 in the single-core Geekbench 4 CPU test (2,490 versus 1,321 and 1,803 respectively), and on a par with it when it comes to multi-core speed and graphics performance. For example, it scored 42fps in the GFX Bench Manhattan offscreen test, compared to 38fps for the Air 2 and 15fps for the Air. When it comes to stamina, the 2017 model outstrips every recent iPad by a distance. In our video-playback test with the screen calibrated to 170cd/m2 and Flight mode engaged, the latest iPad lasted 14hrs 47mins; that’s more than four hours longer than the iPad Air 2, and also significantly longer than the Galaxy Tab S3.
As you can tell, there’s nothing here to make us truly excited – but by dropping the price of its 9.7in tablet, Apple further cements its grip on the tablet market. The new iPad may not be the iPad Air 3 we were all expecting and hoping for, but it’s the tablet you should buy if you don’t want to spend iPad Pro money.