Forget the Haters, Don’t Be Afraid to Buy the Cheapest iPad

It’s become incredibly common for tech publications (and people on Reddit) to give out blanket advice to skip the base iPad and buy an iPad Air instead. I’m here to tell you that for most people, most of the time, the base iPad is more than you actually need.

What iPad Are We Talking About Here?

To be clear, the specific iPad I’m talking about here is the 2025 iPad 11, which starts at $349. Notably, this iPad starts at 128GB of storage, and I would strongly advise avoiding any iPad with 64GB of storage. 128GB is perfectly usable for a casual audience, but it is worth adding $100 to bump it up to 256GB if you can. Apple is notorious for pricing storage upgrades poorly, but $100 for double the space isn’t the worst they’ve done.

This is Apple’s cheapest tablet, and is often seen as a device that’s really meant for education customers like schools, making it a competitor to Chromebooks. That creates the impression that regular members of the public should avoid this entry-level Apple tablet in favor of the iPad Air, which starts at $599 for a 128GB model.

The Air is undoubtedly the sweet spot for getting premium features (many of which trickled down from the iPad Pro) at a moderate price, but you can almost buy two iPad 11s for the price of one Air, so those features really need to justify the cost.

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It’s true that some previous base model iPads, such as the iPad 9, did compromise a little too much to recommend them, but the current iPad 11 (and the iPad 10 with higher storage options) have passed the point where the experience in isolation can be seen as compromised.

The iPad 11 is an 11-inch tablet with a Liquid Retina Display, and the Apple A16 chip, albeit with a slightly cut-down GPU with one of the five GPU cores disabled. You get the same Center Stage-capable front-facing camera tech as in more expensive tablets.

Most importantly, you get access to the same Apple ecosystem that people who pay hundreds or thousands of dollars more for their iPads do. It’s easy to forget that you get a huge amount of great free software with every iPad, including office apps, Garageband, iMovie, and many more.

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Even the Cheapest iPad Is a Great Tablet

If you look at the base iPad in isolation, you’re getting a tablet with a fantastic battery life, great screen, and enough horsepower to pretty much do whatever you need it to. Including playing some pretty intense 3D games and content creation, whether it’s video editing, music production, or drawing art.

It only feels like a lesser device when you put it up against the iPad Air, but that’s exactly what Apple wants you to think. This is a classic upsell, where the company wants you to spend twice as much for a more premium device. However, while the differences between the iPad and the iPad Air are substantial, I would argue that unless you have a specific need for that level of performance or some of the other premium features, paying almost double isn’t worth it because you’re still going to do the same stuff and get largely the same experience.

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We’ve long ago passed the “good enough” phase of budget iPads and it’s hard to think of something in the iPad Air that falls into the “need” category rather than the “want” category. Again, if you don’t care about the extra $250, then buy the best iPad you can for your larger budget, but the idea that the $349 iPad option is objectively bad, or bad value for money, is keeping people away from owning a great product at an amazing price.

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There’s No Real Competition From Android

Android tablets have historically been pretty dire, even at the high end. Even when the hardware is great, Android is a letdown as a tablet operating system. At least in my opinion. While ipadOS is built around the idea that a tablet isn’t just a big smartphone, for some reason Android tablet makers just can’t seem to get the software side sorted.

At the budget end of the market, Android tablets also have a persistent issue with mediocre components, especially on the processor front, which really hurts the user experience when apps lag, or you have to wait a few seconds for something to happen when doing basic stuff like browsing the web. Likewise, Apple’s speaker and screen technology easily outclasses most budget Android tablets at similar prices.

There are some promising options, like Lenovo Tab P11 Pro Gen 2, which is even cheaper than the base iPad and offers an OLED screen, but I would be hesitant to buy one for my mom, because I know those tech-support calls are coming down the line. Android is great for those who love to tinker, but a tablet computer should be more like an appliance than a hobbyist toy, if you ask me.

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Apps Still Run Great on Apple’s Lowest Spec Tablet

It’s easy to forget that this “entry-level” iPad packs a processor that was in flagship iPhones just a few years ago. In fact, it’s the same chip that’s in my iPhone 14 Pro, minus one GPU core. Apple’s chips are comfortably ahead of the curve, so a flagship chip from 2022 is anything but “budget” or “entry” level today.

A very small number of iPad games (e.g. Death Stranding and Resident Evil 8) require an M-Series chip, and apart from these outliers, all apps and games should run just fine on this iPad model. The same certainly can’t be said of Android tablets in this price range.

I honestly think that the current baseline iPad model represents a mix of features and price that you won’t find anywhere else, and unless you have very specific performance or feature requirements, or you’re not budget-conscious, it’s probably the best value tablet money can buy today. Unless, of course, you care deeply about Apple Intelligence, which the base iPad does not feature.

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