I have been very vocal online about how much I love my iPad 10 so this post serves as a moment for to admit when I was wrong. The iPad 10 is not enough for me, a tech enthusiast, to be content with. There are many flaws I have found after having this product for a few months that make me want to trade it in and upgrade to an iPad Air and so I wanted to talk about them as I type up one final post from my iPad.

I my iPad 10 was the first iPad that I had purchased since my iPad Pro 10.5” in 2017. Toward the end of that device’s life, I had stopped using it more than for an alarm clock. It was full of apps that I never used and it felt dated in the hand. Games would have terrible performance, the screen would have incorrect inputs, and the battery would drain so fast that it wasn’t usable for college. I wanted to update my iPad without breaking the bank and I decided that an iPad 10 would be the way to go. My parents paid for the cost of the iPad as a gift to me and I picked this one out. I thought that it would have all I needed…and technically I wasn’t wrong.

The iPad 10 does many things very well. It has the new squared design language introduced in the 2018 iPad Pro. It has USB-C which can be used to charge it and transfer data. It has Apple Pencil support, a feature relegated to only the pro devices when I last was in the market for an iPad. It had support for its very own keyboard, another pro level feature that was now on the base model. Other than the reduced framerate from promotion 120 fps to a standard 60, I had no reason to consider anything more powerful than this device. I was excited to be able to get everything I needed for an entry cost of $349.99 on sale from Amazon (before accessories). This was before the price drop from April that made this the standard price for the iPad 10.

Once the iPad arrrived, I immediately fell in love with it. The design felt so sleek and modern. I started to use it as a main device for content consumption while removing all apps that could be used for texting and frustrating social media. I started reading more. I wasn’t so bogged down with notifications on my phone. The iPad was a simple device that did simple iPad things and that was my favorite thing about it.

Now that I had started to fall in love with the iPad, I started using it for more than I originally thought. It was more convenient than I thought to connect a controller and play some really fun games like COD Mobile. The touch-based game League of Legends Wild Rift was also really fun. I started downloading more games and apps…and then I hit the first wall. The storage was already filling up. I actually had to stop downloading a resource pack for Call of Duty due to there not being enough storage. I didn’t know that I wanted to use the iPad to game but now that I was really enjoying it, I was really disappointed to find that I would have to regliously download and delete apps that I didn’t want. I was at the end of the storage limit and I had the device for a few months….how was this going to last me another 5 years?

Graphical fidelity in some games like League of Legends couldn’t hit max without losing out on some FPS. Normally when you buy a device, you get a little bit of time where it can play all current games on max settings before having to pull the graphic performance down later in its lifespan. That was not the case here. The A14 processor, first released for the iPhone 12 Pro, was starting to show its age a little bit.

Not all of my concerns revolved around the device’s ability to do gaming tasks. During some browsing sessions, I would have a couple tabs open while playing a YouTube video in the bottom corner. These things are obviously not super easy but for a brand new device, I thought that they would work. Most of the time they did but there were quite a few times where the whole device would lock up and prevent me from doing anything further. I had to lock and unlock the device, force close apps, and restart the iPad more times than I am proud of. This all comes down to RAM. The iPad 10 has 4GB of RAM. This is enough to do basic iPad things but for more in-depth multitasking, it folds under the pressure. The RAM bottleneck created a new problem that I had not foreseen, a lack of features in the next version of iOS.

iOS 18 is a big release. In a world of AI, Apple had to make a big splash in the space and, from all the tech demos and descriptions I have seen so far, they really did a good job. Apple Intelligence (fun rebrand of AI) is the future of the Apple ecosystem…and the iPad I bought in March was not getting this feature announced in June. I know that this iPad is a base model and I know that it has a lower powered processor so I guess I didn’t know what I was expecting. I thought that it would be capable to run new features for a few years to come before it started getting the paired back versions of iPadOS with features stripped out. The iPhone 15 has been out for less than a year and it finds itself on the outside of the AI hype party as well. In the days following the announcement of the A17 or M-series minimum requirement, we found out that the reason has to do with memory. The LLM alone takes over 4GB of RAM to load up and that is more than the iPad 10 has total. With that in mind, it makes sense that it won’t be getting that feature. I guess this device’s target demographic doesn’t care too much about that but the tech enthusiast trying to ball on a budget is really going to feel left out. This would be the one device I have that wouldn’t have that feature and that fracture of the ecosystem felt bad. It’s not worth it on its own but the final factor pushed me over the edge.

The iPad 10 trade in value is $250, $100 less than what was paid for it new. In their new back to school promotion, Apple is giving out $100 discount gift cards to people who buy an iPad Air. Once trading in this device, getting the $50 education discount, and adding in the card, I can get the newly realeased M2 iPad Air for $199. That $200 is getting me a lot.

• CPU: iPhone level A14 to Desktop class M2
• RAM: 4GB to 8GB
• Internal Storage: 64GB to 128GB
• Display: Unlaminated to Laminated
• Slight weight reduction
• Compatibility with the backlit iPad Magic Keyboard from the previous line of pro iPads.

It’s time to “eat crow”, the iPad 10 is not the universally recommendable iPad that I originally thought it was. If I wasn’t someone who had spent over 10 years of my life working in computer repair and IT, I wouldn’t be thinking so much about overhead. This device is getting me through the things that I want to do right now. That being said, I can’t act like I don’t have the wisdom of years of tech experience. I know that there are things that I am going to want to do in a year or two that I won’t be able to do. Heck, it’s happening already. While the trade in value for this device is high, I’m going to “sell high” and recoup some cost.

While this didn’t work, I am glad that I started at the lower end and worked myself to the middle rather than my previous purchasing habit of buying the most expensive thing and not fully utilizing all of the features. The iPad Air is going to be a more than capable device for all the things that I am going to do and will last me as long or longer than my old 10.5” iPad Pro did before now.

It is sad to see the iPad 10 go. Autism makes me grow attached to physical things. My parents purchased this device for me and here I am trading it in months later. They totally support my decision and are happy they money from the trade in will help me get the device that I actually need. Shout out to them for always supporting me, even when I hyper focus on iPad specs for hours and contact them in a defeated mess. Shout out to my partner who sat up with me for far too many hours helping me make this call as well.

Welp, it’s about that time. I am signing off of the blog from the iPad 10 for the last time. If you have any questions about the iPad 10 and my experience with it, feel free to shoot me a message. The next time I speak to you will be behind the keyboard of an M2 iPad Air!