APC_Australia_Issue_442_June_2017

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“The screen is 9.7 inches,
with a resolution of 2,048
x 1,536. There’s nothing
fancy about it — you don’t
get the TrueTone display or
wide colour gamut of the
iPad Pro. It’s just a beautiful,
detailed, bright screen that
we have no complaints
about for the cost.”
TABLET
FROM $469 | APPLE.COM/AU
Apple iPad (2017)
Subtle tweaks and lower pricing make this the best-value iPad yet.
This iPad is the most
exciting boring
update to a product
we’ve ever seen.
It’s the replacement for the
iPad Air 2 at the lowerprice
end of Apple’s 10-inch
tablet range, and doesn’t
include any fancy new
tricks or features. What it
does is take a great tablet,
make it a little bit faster,
a little bit cheaper and give
it even better battery life.
These upgrades come with
a surprising downside — it’s
thicker and heavier than
the iPad Air 2. It’s pretty
weird to see Apple add bulk
to a product given its near
fetish-level obsession with
all things thin and light, but
this iPad is the same 469g
weight and 7.5mm thickness
of the original iPad Air.
That’s a weight increase
of just 32g and a more
noticeable 1.4mm thickness.
So that’s the one really
obvious downside, but even
that comes with a bonus,
in that this has a bigger
battery than the Air 2 —
in fact, it’s even bigger than
the 9.7-inch iPad Pro. That’s
especially interesting when
you pair it with the new
processor, which is an Apple
A9, as seen in the iPhone 6s.
It’s not, you’ll note, an A9X
processor, which is what the
12.9-inch iPad Pro models
run — basically, a beefier
version of the same chip.
This means you’ve got a
power-sipping phone
processor that’s paired with
a battery nearly five times
larger. The main power draw
on a tablet is the screen, and
the iPad fifth-gen (as Apple
is calling it, apparently
pretending that the Airs
didn’t happen, a bit like
when Superman Returns
skipped over the existence
of Superman III and IV —
except the Airs were
actually good) has a slightly
brighter screen than the Air
2, so you’ll still get around
the standard 10–12 hours of
use from it, as you do from
other iPads. But in our tests,
it does work out as one of
the longest-lasting tablets
around. It’s good for 12–13
hours of video at mid-level
brightness, and nearly as
much from regular light use
such as emailing and web
browsing. We think only the
iPad mini 4 was as good for
battery life, and that had
a much smaller screen.
Obviously, games or other
really intensive tasks lower
the figures a lot to more like
6–7 hours.
The A9 processor is a good
step forward from the A8X
in the iPad Air 2, despite
being a phone chip, rather
than a dedicated tablet one.
It’s a dual-core chip, and
despite being slower than
the iPhone 7’s A10 chip, it’s
more than fast enough for
everything you probably
want to do with a $470
tablet. Apps don’t hang, web
browsing is fast, everything
is totally fluid, and it comes
on instantly from sleeping.
It’s only got 2GB of RAM, but
with the way iOS manages
apps, this doesn’t really get
in the way, or slow things
down the way it might on a
laptop or Windows hybrid
tablet. If you want to create
or edit an 8K image, you’ll
want something beefier —
the Pro, the Samsung
Galaxy Tab S3 or a laptop.
The screen is 9.7 inches,
with a resolution of 2,048 x
1,536. There’s nothing fancy
about it — you don’t get the
TrueTone display or wide
colour gamut of the iPad
Pro. It’s just a beautiful,
detailed, bright screen that
we have no complaints about
for the cost.
There are a few minor
disappointments here;
we’d love to have seen the
vastly improved speakers
from the iPad Pro, and the
camera is pretty lacklustre.
It may sound like we’re a bit
down on the new iPad, but
that’s only because its
improvements aren’t the
flashy kind. It’s exactly what
we liked about the iPad
before, but cheaper and
faster, and comes with 32GB
of storage as standard.
Matt Bolton
Verdict
Features
Performance
Value
It’s not the most exciting update,
but this latest iPad is an amazing
piece of kit for the price.
30 www.apcmag.com