Summary: Another year, another round of tablet upgrades.
October cometh, and with that is the latest round of iPad upgrades.
We don't know for sure what will be in the next version, although I took a stab at it around this time last year, so we'll find out in very short order whether I came close or not with my predictions.
When I heard just before I left on my vacation to Mexico last week that
Apple was going to have an iPad event on the 16th, I immediately logged
into
Amazon Trade-In and put my iPad Air 128GB up for cash. They offered me a cool $407.
Gazelle and a few other companies
do the same thing, but I find that Amazon is usually the best way to go,
as their offers tend to be more generous and I spend a lot of money
with them as a Prime customer anyway, so it doesn't matter much to me
that it is for store credit.
If you decided that you were going to do the same thing today, assuming
your device is in pristine, "like new" condition, you'd get $361. So in
the course of a week, right after it was known a new version was going
to be announced, the value of a used iPad Air depreciated $47.
My device of course has always lived in an OtterBox or some other
heavy-duty protective case, so it's perfect. I've kept the original
packaging, cable, and charger, so I expect that Amazon will give me the
full $407. I sent it off via UPS today.
I am officially iPad-free, at least temporarily. My Surface 2 and
Surface Pro will have to hold me over for a bit, and my iPhone 6 can
fill the app gap.
Keep in mind that the iPad Air 128GB Wi-Fi was $799.00 brand new, so
even with my $407.00 store credit offer from Amazon, that's a net loss
of $392.00, or the equivalent of leasing an iPad at $32.66 a month over
the course of a year.
It sounds nutty, but I do this every single year. Why? Because it's
better than the device becoming absolutely worthless for
current-generation apps within 2 or 3 years if I were to keep it.
Last year, I traded in my iPad 4th Generation 64GB for $387.50. And the
year before that, I got $575.00 for my 3rd Generation 64GB.
See a pattern here? There's more and more iPads on the secondary market
and thus the value of the current model depreciates more and more the
same time every year.
I did actually consider keeping the current iPad Air and giving it to my
wife, but she rebuffed my advances, preferring her Windows Phone and
her touchscreen laptop.
Why not keep my iPads for as long as possible? Sure, plenty of people do
that. They hand them down to their kids, maybe they don't need the
latest and greatest stuff. But I'm a technology writer and I need to
keep up with this junk, and I can easily make up the price of a new one
with a few articles covering accessories and the like.
Still, it's not just keeping up with the latest and greatest. I bought the iPad Air, but I did not... love the thing.
I used it a lot, sure. I used it every day. I played games on it
constantly. But it seemed to me beyond the basic form factor changes and
the usual processor rev, the iPad Air was not a massive improvement
over the iPad 4th Generation.
We did not get a fundamental display improvement over the 4th Generation
with the iPad Air. We did not get magnetic induction charging. We did
not get Touch ID. And frankly the stereo sound output on the iPad still
kind of bites compared to some of its competitors.
Now, if you waited two generations, maybe three generations until you
upgraded, you might have noticed a big difference. But for those of us
lunatics that need to have the latest model every year, the iPad Air was
a bit of a letdown.
Sure, you could argue the move towards a 64-bit CPU and a discrete
motion sensor processor is a big deal, but I actually haven't noticed
tangible benefits of 64-bit processing yet, particularly with business
applications like Microsoft Office or Apple iWork.
There were only a few games that I played over the course of that last
year that I could have said that they worked fundamentally better than
on the previous device. Perhaps they had graphic enhancements I wasn't
able to examine side-by-side with the old model.
So maybe I'm getting a bit jaded.
You could also argue how much thinner and lighter the device was over previous versions. That's fine and good until you throw it in an OtterBox that adds an extra pound of weight to protect it from getting damaged, considering how fragile a device it is.
You know what I really want in the new model? Other than not making it
out of eggshells and potato chips so I don't have to put armor plating
on it? Besides adding inductive charging and Touch ID?
A much larger screen, like the rumored iPad Pro is supposed to have.
I'm getting older, I just got progressive lenses and I'm tired of
looking at little screens with tiny fonts. I want 4K resolution with an
active stylus so I can draw hyper-realistic paintings of my poodles and
actually read something in the Kindle app without squinting.
I used to think it was enough, and I was really impressed with it when the iPad 3 came out,
but 9.7" and 2560 pixels wide at 267ppi doesn't cut it anymore. My
glasses prescription just went up over 2 diopters. I want in excess of
400ppi on a 13" display. Is that too much to ask?
Tank, I need business intelligence dashboards! LOTS OF DASHBOARDS!
Although it's not a hard requirement, what I would like to see from Apple is a heterogeneous multi-core SoC using
big.LITTLE
ARM architecture so the device conserves battery for apps that don't
need all the horsepower, so we can get closer to 20 hours of battery
life out of the tablet.
Of course, instead
we'll probably get some souped-up version of the A8 with some better GPU than what the iPhone 6 uses, so I doubt it.
And I'd like some more RAM, please. 2GB would not be bad, it would beat
the 1GB on the Air, but 4GB would be so, so much better. I mean how many
times have you crashed an app on iOS because of a resource deficit?
Oh well. At least I have some more spending money now for whatever comes next.
Have you cashed in your iPad yet, hoping the new model will be better?
Talk Back and Let Me Know.
~ Jason Perlow
