Since OP doesn't want to have any sort of back-and-forth, I guess I'll just shout into the void with a few of my thoughts on the topic.
I think the iPad lineup itself, at its core, is relatively straightforward. It's a story of gradual upsell in the same way that the iPhone lineup is. Every $100 gets you a small handful of extra features, and it's easy to find yourself having climbed the pricing ladder all the way to the top. You go from good -> better -> even better -> best with gradual increases is pricing as you climb from the 9th-gen to the 10th-gen iPad, then to the Air, and finally to the Pros. There are some feature gaps that are relatively small, like the $449 iPad to the $599 Air, and some sidesteps like the niche iPad mini, but I think on the whole it's a spectrum of features with a spectrum of prices that align well. One distinction from the iPhone lineup is that there are a lot of models that are out of sync with regards to update timing, and that can leave to some awkward gaps. One instance is the base model iPad having been just redesigned and switching its selfie camera to landscape, which the other models will presumably follow suit with, but the Pro won't be redesigned until its next generation. That's a
little confusing, but it's not the end of the world to me.
What's way more confusing and disjointed than the iPad lineup, to me, is the accessories that pair with those iPads. Two pencils with three different connection methods, and the necessitation of a dongle to connect the seven-year-old Pencil to the two-week-old iPad. That's weird. It's also strange that the keyboard accessory for the $449 iPad is
a. different than and
b. objectively better in some ways than the keyboard accessory that the vastly more expensive iPads use. One might assume that the 'Pros' would've liked a larger trackpad and a row of function keys, and yet that keyboard remains hampered without that functionality.
I guess you could argue that by extension of the accessories, since they are such a critical part of the iPad experience, the iPad lineup itself is confusing. But I thought it was important to make that distinction. I'm ready to be barraged with links again!
www.macrumors.com
9to5mac.com
www.imore.com
