2020 iPad: Faster Than Last Year’s iPad Air | PCMag

Hi i'm sasha sigan from pcmag.com here with the new 8th generation ipad now the 8th gen ipad looks almost exactly like the 7th gen ipad you have the same 10.2 inch screen same big bezels same touch id home button same lightning port uh speakers along the bottom not dual speakers it is almost exactly the same size and same weight same smart keyboard attachment i'll show you more of that in a minute um so is there anything different about this oh

Same camera same camera is there anything different about this yes the one big change between the 7th gen ipad and the 8th gen ipad is that we've gone from an a10 processor to an a12 processor and that's a lot more performance if your old ipad was feeling sluggish in any way now uh just aggression you probably don't need to upgrade an ipad that's less than about three years old but if your old ipad was feeling sluggish in any way

This new ipad is absolutely going to scream and now i loaded various games and uh various games and productivity applications on here um as you can see it plays games from apple arcade just gorgeously so i loaded up various games from apple arcade and they all play gorgeously very smooth very fluid um and i did some sketching with this first gen apple pencil now just like the 7th gen ipad the atm ipad works with the 99 cylindrical first gen apple pencil this

Is the one with the weird little lightning port on the top where you charge it by plugging its end into the ipad like that now this is possibly the most awkward charging situation i have ever seen in the world uh the second gen pencil is much better and i'll get to various things about possibly what you can get rather than this ipad in a minute uh but uh so it works with the pencil it works fine with the pencil it's just it's a slightly awkward pencil it's a

Very cylindrical pencil so it will roll off your table if your table is slanted at all and it works with this nice snap-on smart keyboard the smart keyboard is a lot better than your standard bluetooth keyboard because it uses the physical pop ports on the ipad so that the connection is perfect there's no lag there's no delay there are no pairing issues and the keys are really nice uh if you want to turn this uh 329 299 dollars for a student's ipad

Into a little laptop uh this is a really great keyboard to do it they keep however the keyboard's expensive it's 159 so you may be thinking this is so much like the 7th gen ipad why just bump the processor and put this out there the answer is price the answer is they are keeping the ipad to 300 for students because they're thinking of this as a product for all of the students out there who are doing remote learning right now and most of those kids are uh

Considering getting chromebooks or maybe they have a chromebook from their school and the average price for a decent chromebook right now is around four hundred dollars so apple needed to come up with a tablet solution that came out to about four hundred dollars ideally with a keyboard and this is what they've got and you know what like i'm mocking it a little because i am an extremely jaded uh tech reporter and i've seen every ipad ever but this is still a

Really powerful product for 300 bucks that a12 processor it screams this is a really nice high-res screen there are a lot more apps designed for the ipad than there are designed to work well on a chromebook let me tell you that and when it's in the keyboard the keyboard's gorgeous and you can get less expensive keyboards there's a logitech keyboard for 49 dollars that you can get for this it's a bluetooth keyboard the ipad fits a little slot

It's just fine so now i am going to review this this is not my full review don't go down in the comments claiming this is a review i've just had a few hours with this it's just a hands-on i'm giving you my initial impressions i'm gonna spend some time reviewing this but i'm also really looking forward to the 599 dollar ipad air because that has a lot of the additional features that i wanted on an ipad this year it has usbc it has better cameras it has smaller bezels

It uses the second gen pencil which won't roll off your table um so the ipad air looks like more of a buy for people who can obviously afford a little more and want a more advanced primary tablet computing system but this little guy for three hundred dollars for remote schooling uh looks so far like a terrific product my full review is not up on pcmag.com yet this is just a hands-on this is just my first thoughts from the first day

Uh keep an eye out for the full review on pcmag.com in the future uh and uh i'll tell you what i think of the 8th gen ipad after i'm done reviewing it thanks a lot for watching