With the announcement of iPad 11, Apple’s entry-level tablet, priced at $349, remains the best deal in tech to this day.
Apple’s iPad 11 Delivers Way too Much Value at a Price of $349 – it’s a Tablet and a Laptop Replacement, Both
The iPad 11 was nothing but a footnote in the announcement for the M3 iPad Air. Just a few lines telling people that the entry-level iPad got an update too.
You wouldn’t even know the tablet got an upgrade if you hadn’t opened that press release.
In fact, the update isn’t that big either. Just an upgraded chip – the A16 Bionic – and double the memory at the same price; now starting at 128GB.
This tablet doesn’t even have Apple Intelligence, and it doesn’t even need it. Because at this price point, no-one is buying an iPad for AI. People are buying this for what I call ‘iPad stuff.’
These things include watching YouTube, Netflix, TV+, social media, and that’s pretty much it. If someone does decide to dip their toes in AI, there are countless apps on the App Store for that.
Want to edit 4K video? You can do that too with iMovie. Just drop your iPhone footage in and you’ll be editing it all without dropping a frame.
In essence, this iPad does everything an expensive model can if you just give it a slight push.
This is fundamentally an iPad and does everything an iPad should.
Just to give you an idea how good this deal is; the original iPad launched at a price of $499 with 16GB of storage. If you take inflation into account, that amount of money is worth more than $700 these days.
The iPad 11 starts at $349 and does way more than the original model. Sure, that’s not a fair comparison, but it goes to show how great the base model has gotten after all these years.
The iPad 11 is a tablet which you can recommend with your eyes closed. It’s a tablet when you need it, and a laptop when you want it to be. It’s an everything device.
Apple clearly knows how much value this tablet offers and does not mess around with it at all. That’s a smart move.
