Hello again, and welcome to another of my weird tech moments, those ones that you think in your brain you really can justify.
Anyway, since May of last year, I was an iPad pro M4 user, didn't use it enough, but I had one. But recently, that all changed. For anyone in the world that cares about these decisions, I'll tell you why and how I ended up on Apple's A16 11th gen iPad.
The main reason-
I wasn't using the M4, pushing it for what it was meant to be pushed for, I didn't need all that power in an iPad. I was doing the basics, and happily so, I felt like I couldn't do much more than the basics anyway, because let's face it, iPadOS is still iPadOS, and if you ask me, I'm pretty much 95% sure Apple simply loves it that way. That's not a complaint, I mean, take the business point of view, you want a more powerful OS from Apple, in their point, "we have a Mac for that"
Battery life-
The iPad pro M4 battery life for me was in iPad terms what I'd only describe as dreadful. A few hours usage would practically kill it, and if you left it on standby for a few hours? Ooo that iPad was angry, I mean sometimes a 20% drop throughout the day. I've read many others with the same issues across Apple's support forums, spoken to a friend with the 13 inch M4 who is equally disappointed in his battery life. As I'm not a heavy user of iPad, I'd rather have a lesser model, better battery and handle the basics well.
As an extra plus, my girlfriend's son appears to love my iPad, the pro wasn't lasting that long, queue the screaming after the battery runs out, but this A16 beast? Keeps up with him more than we do, 2 days solid battery across him using it, chucked in with some of my lighter use cases.
Bending-
Yes, as did my M1 iPad Air, my M4 iPad pro also bent, and, yes, they were both in a case, after having enough of seeing my expensive iPads bend, I went for the more thicker 11th gen. My brother's 10th gen has no issues in the bend department, and he's been using that for going on 3 years now.
Conclusion-
Sitting here now writing this out on what you may call my basic and downgraded iPad, I'm happy to have finally found the model that meets my needs best, I'm also happy that it includes the battery health features, that's a massive plus going forward. Being totally blind, I couldn't care less about display quality, and yep, it’s a non-laminated display, but flip the negative to a positive and you have a cheaper and easier to replace display.
Anyway, that's enough from me, what has your iPad experience been like? What are you using? Any issues, and how has it held up for you?
By danno5, 10 May, 2025
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I have the M1
Over the years, I’ve owned many iPads—starting with the iPad 4 Cellular, followed by the iPad Pro 9.7, Pro 11, Mini 5, Mini 6, Air with the M1 chip, as well as the iPad 9 and iPad 10. Last year, drawn by Apple’s claims about enhanced intelligence and performance, I decided to purchase the iPad Air with the M1 processor. However, I noticed no meaningful improvement in performance compared to the iPad 9 or 10. There was nothing I could do on the M1 Air that I couldn’t already do on the cheaper models, and frankly, I regret the purchase. If I had the chance, I would sell the Air and get the iPad Mini 7 instead.
As a blind user, I see little to no advantage in owning an M-series iPad. There are no improved voices, no real use of Apple’s so-called intelligence, and the overall experience remains the same across devices. Currently, I use the iPad 9 for my kids, the iPad 10 for my wife, and I still have the M1 Air, but there’s virtually no noticeable difference among them. The core problem lies in iPadOS itself—it’s limited and holds back the hardware, especially when Apple refuses to meaningfully distinguish it from iOS.
My advice to anyone considering an iPad: don’t buy the M-series unless you truly need that extra processing power for specific tasks. For everyday use like reading and writing on the go, a basic iPad is more than enough—and far more cost-effective.
Not really useful to me
I had an iPad 2 and 3rd generation back in my sighted days, used to love the platform particularly for gaming, and do recognize that it also had a huge user experience potential in other domains like music production, where applications like Alchemy Synth made it really shine in my opinion, and the iOS version of Garage Band was also quite good but never really liked its skeuomorphic design. The upgrade to a retina display on the third-generation iPad was also introduced at the right time for me, because one of the things I also used my iPad for was reading documentation in iBooks, usually in PDF form, where smaller fonts would push the standard definition screen of the iPad 2 over its limits and ruin the immersive experience by reminding me that in the end it's all just a bunch of square pixels. After the iPad Air, however, I think that Apple began to lose their way with the platform.
These days, as a totally blind user with a 9th generation iPad that I value more for being my late mother's main entertainment consumption device than for the functionality itself, I find the iPad to not be a very useful device. The screen doesn't really matter to me at all, and its size actually makes navigation a lot worse in my opinion as I find it easy to lose referential awareness, plus I find that the screen-reader user experience is significantly degraded by the multi-column design language of the large screen idiom not working well with flick gesture navigation. The on-screen keyboard is also way too big to type with one hand while holding the device with the other, which might be a usability problem for sighted people as well but at least they don't need to use the edges of the device for referential awareness.
Apple's push to make the iPad a walled garden desktop computer has also, in my opinion, resulted in a system that's actually subpar at everything it does, and the design of the entire lineup seems to be profit-driven rather than purpose-driven. In this regard I kinda wish Apple would return to the category simplicity of the early Jobs era, when they had the iProduct category like the iBook and iMac targeting casual users and the PowerProduct category like the PowerBook and PowerMac targeting professional users, and all the products had a clear purpose. Apple has been losing its mojo for quite some time, and unlike most people, I actually think that this loss of focus can be traced all the way back to Jobs himself, who had already lost a lot of his visionary gift when he passed.
My recommendation to blind people thinking of getting an iPad is to get an iPhone instead. You're not losing out on almost anything for choosing an iPhone, you can still pair it with a Mac Magic Keyboard to it if for some reason you wish to experience a desktop iPad, and most third-party applications are iPhone-first or iPhone-only.