A new design, eye-catching colours and the power of the A14 Bionic chip make this base model appealing
Along with the two new sizes of iPad Pro, Apple also dropped a landmark basemodel iPad that comes with a new all-screen design, 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display and four gorgeous colours. It also sheds certain vestigial hardware elements from Apple’s standard tablet family – namely the Home button and Lightning port; elements that still exist on the ninthgeneration iPad, which the company continues to sell, too.
There’s much to love about the new iPad (and all its cool colours). It now features the aesthetic first introduced with the 2018 iPad Pro. Gone are the curved edges and wide white bezels, replaced with a perfectly flat back and flat edge running around the perimeter of the device. It’s the most significant design change for the line since the introduction of the iPad Air in 2013. That model shaved off almost a half pound from the original, now decade-plusold iPad design, and the change was probably more about portability than any activity you might want to engage in on your tablet.
We’ve come a long way since the days when we’d watch YouTube videos, take some sub-par photos, and use 2x-zoomed iPhone apps on the iPad. Apple’s tablets now have their own iPadOS 16 platform, which in addition to making them better for multi-tasking, makes it easier for users to perform more laptop-like tasks, such as plugging in a flash drive and accessing files in the file manager.
Apple’s base iPad has, in recent years, been on the receiving end of the company’s ‘good enough’ camera strategy and this latest iPad is no different. The rear camera is better than the one on last year’s model, and there’s the same high-quality, 12MP Ultra Wide FaceTime camera on the front. Apple has also made the welcome decision to move the front camera from one of the short edges to the dead centre of the bezel on one of the long sides – it’s a game-changer for video calls, and we guarantee that iP
