As someone who’s hasn’t upgraded their iPad in over 8 years (and I don’t want to upgrade more often than I need to), my concern isn’t with performance/features today but whether it’s gonna bite me 5 years from now.
Went through this dance with the 9.7” pro. The ram felt stingy at the time, and while the shipping version of iPadOS and apps ran just fine, it only took a year or two before the device was starting to stutter and lag doing basic tasks, and has become progressively more unpleasant to use since. so it’s not a hypothetical, it’s just how Apple makes their software. I’m fully confident there will come a day where you need a terabyte of ram just to type without lag. (Probably running a couple thousand ai models that still can’t autocorrect worth a damn)
I say all of this as someone who really DOESNT want to shell out for the 16gb upgrade, but I can’t help but see that they’ve been selling 8gb base models with 16gb upgrades for 3 years now, and it being not long before 12gb or something becomes the new baseline for if you want the OS to not stutter and lag.
PS, I’d love nothing more than to be wrong about this!