Yeah, as an entry level deal, den new iPad isn't bad at all.
What IS negative is that now there's going to be a significant gap between entry level and pro.
I think that's the point.
If you've got an Air 2 and want to upgrade, you HAVE to get a pro which contains a whole lot of stuff most iPad users don't want or need and is much more expensive..
There's basically no satisfying point for mid-range buyers, it's eather cheap entry level or overpay.
The new iPad is mid-range. Apple has no low end tablets. IMO, the Air 2 was upper mid-range.
However, now we have a mid-range tablet with a faster CPU than the previous upper mid-range tablet.
My choice is getting the Air 2 while supplies last. Of course if you already have an Air 2 the new iPad is a downgrade. And considering the price and limitation of the "Pro" model (2GB of RAM, are you kidding me) at this point you might as well wait for the next iPad Pro which is rumored to be out with a new chip.
Although I'm glad to have two of the Air 2 iPads, if I were buying today, I'd might buy the new iPad, mainly because of the faster SoC.
The Air 2 can play most mainstream 1080p h.265 HEVC, but sometimes its A8X gets pretty stressed out doing it. With long videos it can overheat, causing stuttering. I'm not sure about the A9, but I'm guessing that with its faster CPU and larger size it might be able to go longer without stuttering.
That said, my iPhone 7 Plus with A10 Fusion stutters with HEVC material a lot sooner than my iPad Air 2 does, probably because of its size.
The sadly ironic part of all of this is that likely all of these devices have hardware HEVC decode support built into the SoC (
which started with Apple's A8/A8X), but it's not used because of stupid licencing issues. It's a total #$&*@$ mess.
http://www.streamingmedia.com/Artic...ts-Time-to-Move-Forward-with-HEVC-113278.aspx
EDIT:
Hmmm... How well is HEVC decode parallelized?
It turns out in some multi-core benches the A9 and the A8X are basically the same. The A9 is the same 1.85 GHz as in the iPhone 6S. I had guessed the A9 in the new iPad would be faster clocked, but that is not the case.
http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/appl...017-review-not-the-ipad-air-3-but-still-great
BTW, that review states that the new iPad has a HUGE advantage for battery life, another good reason to buy the new iPad.
In our video-playback test with the screen calibrated to 170cd/m2 and flight mode engaged, the latest iPad lasted 14hrs 47mins; that’s more than four hours longer than the iPad Air 2 and over two hours longer than the original iPad Air.