I went with a Huawei MediaPad M5 and a year or so later I’m still very happy with it. $200.
I love my Surface Pro. it is my main device though and I’ll agree that it is a massive overkill for a secondary one.
What app are you using? There are great photo editing apps that work with Photos.
Darkroom. Pixelmator.
Oh and using the Pencil is a must.
I got me THIS HERE CHROMEBOOK.
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D6FN5RJ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
It’s a Chromebook, but the keyboard simply detaches magnetically and then it’s an Android tablet! Runs apps and everything. Great screen.
[edit] Oh, jeez, the price went up $100 since I bought mine.
I’m sure that’s true but I’ve got a 6 year old iPad air that still functions as a media device. I doubt I would be able to say the same about an Android device. You’d never catch me with an Apple phone but I think Apple’s the way to go as far as tablets are concerned.
We’re an Android house. I have a Tab S6, not a cheap tablet by any means. We also have a decked out Pixelbook. While they would both do what @triggercut needs, I’d be the first to tell him, an iPad user, to stay in that universe. He will get more utility out of that, or an actual MS Surface running a true OS than he would running Android or Chrome OS. The apps are only semi-OK, and there are a lot of features that just don’t work the same on a lot of things.
Trigger, get a keyboard for whatever you go with if it isn’t included. They take any tablet a step up toward feeling like you can actually get more than games and watching videos done.
Even posting here on this very forum is a chore on my Tab S6. The tap on-scree-keyboard is a bear to use since the tablet is large and the keys are large meaning holding and typing aren’t something you can do quickly. You have to lay it flat down to type on it with any degree of speed, creating an annoyance if you are just sitting somewhere without a table.
The base iPad is on sale for $249, can’t beat that with a stick.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/apple-ipad-latest-model-with-wi-fi-32gb-space-gray/5985609.p
Yep, and MicroCenter (lucky enough to have one nearby) price-matches and beats that price by another $10, on the base iPad, the 128 gb version, and even the Air 3.
(I ended up getting the Air 3 as an open box model at $399, which was too good a deal to walk away from.)
Yeah that is outstanding.
I have been offered a used iPad 2017 32GB in mint condition. As an Android guy, how fast is this thing in 2020?
Faster than any Android tablet?
That isn’t an easy answer. Yes spec-wise, pretty much any iPad is faster than anything on Android, but newer versions of iOS are very taxing on the hardware. My 2015 iPad is probably faster than anything Android has today, but it can barely run iOS 13. To the point I would rather not use it. And its not as simple as just going back to a previous version of iOS if you find your iPad is running sluggish.
I would guess a 2017 iPad runs iOS 13 fine (or what ever version its on), but I would want to try it before I bought it. Also if you are an Android person, you may not like iOS. iPadOS is much more locked down, and for someone who likes Android, that could be a huge negative.
I way prefer Android phones to iPhones, but I’d definitely recommend an iPad, even an older one, for a tablet. But it depends what your use cases are. My iPad (a 2017 one, which runs iOS 13 fine) is a media consumption device and board game player, primarily. I don’t do any productivity stuff on it, so the locked-down nature doesn’t bother me.
I think something may be up with your iPad because I got my iPad Air 2 secondhand in January of 2015 (so it’s probably a 2014 model) and it is running iOS 13 and I haven’t noticed any performance issues.
That said, probably I should look at updating it in the next year or two. Didn’t realize quite how old it was.
That’s interesting. I did a fresh install and no luck. Not sure what could be wrong with it. Maybe it’s just me, since I usually use a newer pro which is very zippy. It could be I am just noticing the difference and the old one feels slow because of it.
We have an OG iPad Air from 2013 and it’s basically fine for web browsing (with the caveat of having to reload tabs due to lack of RAM) and things like watching YouTube, Netflix etc. I assume that it works fine for most games as well although I’m sure the newer graphics heavy games would be too much for it.
I think this is overstating the case a bit. In my experience, older iPads do fine if / when you turn off some of the newer multi-tasking stuff that wasn’t really made for those models & they aren’t as well-equipped to handle.
Diego
That’s fair. I haven’t turned anything off on it to try and make it better, but I rarely use it. App switching is one of the things that is painful to do on it. But again, I think I notice it more because I am used to using a newer iPad.
Just a rule of thumb but i never update older Apple equipment to the latest OS version when there is a new hardware release as well.
My wife uses a Surface Pro 6 for bursts of work when she’s at the courthouse, she seems to find it more functional on the road than the MacBook she uses at home, but her firm uses Office 365 and Exchange, so there’s a lot of MS integration she can take advantage of. The boys have used Surface Go tablets for college and found them useful. All of them have the type covers and MS pencils. My wife does think the Apple Stylus on her iPad Pro is a bit better experience than the MS pencil. I’ve tried using both for freehand drawing and neither seems like a true tool for an artist to use.
EDIT: woops, didn’t realize this was an old post. Ah, well.
Yeah, the RAM increase between the Air and Air 2 was a pretty big deal. Apple is perfectly content to have you dissatisfied with new OS versions on your old hardware.