Keep your iPad in tip-top shape.
Your iPad is the perfect Apple device for entertainment. While your Mac is your workhorse for day-to-day tasks and your iPhone is always with you as your wallet, your camera, and your social media companion, your iPad tends to be for those moments when you’re kicking back and relaxing on the sofa, watching a movie, or playing a game.
In fact, at home, you’re probably going to be using your iPad more than your other devices, so it makes sense to make sure that it’s in tip-top shape for the rest of the year. Follow these nine tips, and you can make sure that your iPad won’t let you down.
We’re going to be using iPadOS 17 for these tips. Most of them will work on earlier versions of iPadOS, too, but the menu options might be slightly dif ferent. If you haven’t already upgraded your iPad to iPadOS 17 yet, then right now is probably the perfect time to do it.
1 Follow the recommendations
Your iPad doesn’t tend to fill up its storage capacity as frequently as your iPhone does because it’s not normally your main camera, or day-to-day device. Space is still an important consideration, though, because if you get down to less than 1GB of free space, your iPad will start slowing down.
We tend to use our iPads for watching and downloading movies, or we install some large games that we then forget about and never play. And don’t forget that if you’ve purchased a movie from Apple, you don’t have to keep it on your iPad — you can download it again at any time, so it makes sense to remove old movies. Head to Settings > General > Storage and look in the Recommendations section to see what your iPad advises you to do. In my case, my iPad recommended turning on offloading apps - this keeps their settings and data on your iPad but moves them off to the cloud, freeing up space. My iPad estimated that this could save me a massive 1GB of space, so I did it.
2 Delete old podcasts or try an alternative to Apple Podcasts
Old podcasts you’ve listened to but left on your iPad are always repeat offenders for taking up unnecessary space. Click Settings and find Podcasts in the list on the left-hand side of the screen. Here, you can turn off Sync Library, which syncs your saved shows across devices. You can also change Automatically Download, which is set to ‘5 latest episodes’ by default — we’d recommend turning it off completely. If you want to take things further to save space, then consider using a different podcast app entirely -Apple Podcasts isn’t particularly good at saving space, so consider alternatives for your iPad like Spotify or Overcast.
3 Check your network connections
A lot of apps require frequent connection to the Inte
