Best iPad for students
Life as a student is great, but it’s not all about partying; you’ll also have to do some work. To make that easier, you will be looking for the best tech. Here, we help you select the best iPad for student life, seeking out the devices that offer the perfect combination of portability, power, ease of use and value for money.
Before you decide which iPad to buy, there are a few things to note. The biggest is the fact that if you are a student, a teacher or are employed by an educational institution, you can get money off a new Apple product by shopping in Apple’s education store. You can read all about how to get an Apple Student Discount on page 67.
BEST FOR BARGAIN HUNTERS: 10.2IN iPAD
Price: £329 from fave.co/3zJWxeF Since we expect that students are likely to be looking for a bargain we’d suggest that the 10.2in iPad is the closest you can get to a bargain iPad – especially once you apply the student discount – see page 53.
The 2020 iPad was comprehensively outshone by the updated iPad Air at last year’s Time Flies event, offering only a dull (albeit significant) spec bump while its costlier sibling got a redesign and raft of new features.
What Apple is calling the eighth-generation iPad is in almost every respect the same as the 10.2in iPad Apple launched in 2019. It differs only in having a processor that’s two generations newer – thereby promising a handy boost in speed – and being very slightly heavier. Is that enough to justify the cost?
Almost certainly not if you’re thinking of upgrading from the 2019 to 2020 models. But it’s important to note that the things tech journalists find appealing (such as differences from the last generation) are not always the things that make a useful, value-for-money product for the average consumer – especially if they haven’t bought a new iPad in years.
So I’m going to do my best to review this tablet as a thing in its own right, with only occasional mentions of the similar model released last year. Our review of the iPad (2020) tests its speed and battery life, evaluates the design and feature set, and helps you decide if this is the right tablet for you.
Price
32GB: £329
128GB: £429
32GB, cellular: £459
128GB, cellular: £559
If the above prices leave room in your budget, you can supplement your purchase with an accessory or two. The new iPad is compatible with the first-generation Apple Pencil stylus (which adds £89 to the cost), and the Smart Keyboard (£159).
Design
The eighth-gen iPad has the same design as last year’s model. But to most people that doesn’t matter: instead, we’ll simply say that this is a slim, attractive tablet that’s lightweight to pick up while offering a display comfortably big enough (10.2in, corner to corner) for gaming and watching films and TV. It’s 490g (or 495g, if you go for the cellular model) and just 7.5mm thick.
Apple’s engineers love to find contrast between gloss and matte surfaces, like the precise, angled brushed-metal chamfer around the edge of the glossy screen, or the shiny Apple logo in the middle of the matte back. You keep finding these kinds of small, thoughtful touches – details that are pleasing to the eye or finger.
These elements have been around a long time, but it’s an elegant, one might say classic, design. The screen-to-body ratio, however, is starting to look a little dated: the inclusion of a Home button on the front, and comparatively thick bezels – about 8mm at left and right, and a positively chunky 20mm at the top and bottom – means you’re not getting as much screen ‘real estate’ for the size of the chassis as you would with an all-screen design like on the last two generations of iPad Pro and the most recent iPad Air.
The back edges of the iPad are curved whereas the front ones are sharp; this has the same ‘pick me up’ effect, when the device is laid down with screen facing up, that Apple used on the iPad 2 back in 2011. Again, it’s a well-worn design language, but I personally find it more welcoming, not to mention easier to pick up, than the uniformly squared-off edges of the newfangled Pro line.
We’ll finish with two old-fashioned elements of the design that we think almost everyone will applaud. The eighth-gen iPad has a headphone port, and its rear-facing camera doesn’t stick out from the main body at all:
