I have an iPad 9 from work, ostensibly as a mobility device as I didn’t use the Android phone they gave me. Broadly though I use the iPad in favour of my corporate HP Elitebook laptop, which would be capable if it weren’t for all the security applied to it and features that are deactivated.
As a work device I don’t game on it much. The iPad 9 runs Office 365, video conferencing (Teams and Zoom) and so on. I switch between Edge and Safari browsers with plenty tabs open and it’s ok. Colleagues comment on how good the camera is compared to our corporate issue laptops. I have edited video on my personal iPad 8 in iMovie (Hollywood here I come) and it was ok. I would say an iPad Pro maxxed out on RAM would be much better but…I don‘t do enough of this to warrant the spend. Other than liking shiny new things.
I’m getting back into playing music and have purchased a modest recording set up to use with GarageBand. Again, I guess a higher spec device and app would be more ‘pro’ but…I’m not a pro… I might try out the 9 with GB for curiosity.
As others have said on another thread, the Air5 is a happy medium. Sufficient pro features to be snappy but not so Pro to be ruinously expensive. I’m looking at getting a used Air5 but am very happy with the iPad 9 from work.
Yeah it's really interesting as I have continued testing the two. I have a 9th gen that I picked up on sale for $249, and I picked up a Pro 11" m2 as well on sale (with plans to return one of them here in the next couple of weeks).
I love th pro as the shiny cool tech toy, it has fantastic speakers, the screen is great, and it's nice having the M2 chip, 8GB RAM, and the 128 GB storage.
However, it's hard to justify when I set them side by side and test the things I do on these devices- browsing websites, using Reddit, Facebook, and banking apps.
The apps and websites load at exactly the same speed on each device, with a couple of instances where it's just a millisecond slower on the 9th gen. But all in all it's quite impressive how similar they are, given the difference in CPU and RAM.
I do take short video clips on my iPhone when we go on hikes, and I put those together into 5-7 minute long movies in iMovie or LumaFusion. I took my latest batch of clips and moved them to both of these iPads, and created the same movie on each- a 5 minute test video. This is what really surprised me- both iMovie and LumaFusion are fast and smooth on both devices- no difference at all. The heaviest thing I do in these apps (or really at all on the iPad) is the export of that movie from these apps. That export is also almost the same speed on these two ipads-- when the Pro m2 was finished with the export, the 9th gen was about 90% complete.
That was the biggest difference I was able to find in performance between the two.
So it seems the 9th gen would be absolutely fine for everything I do (I suspect the problems with a lower spec iPad like the 9th gen really only come in when playing heavy games- but I am not a gamer, so haven't tried any of that).
I really like the Pro, it's just such a nice device, and it's great peace of mind knowing I have the top of the line device that is future proof with that M2 chip and the added RAM just in case the apps I use in the coming years will become more resource-intensive.
I can afford it, but it feels hard to justify $700 for a device that another for only $250 can do almost exactly the same.
I'm still debating, I have until early February on the return window on these- but am hoping to decide soon so I can return one and be done with this back and forth. haha