Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsDoesn't seem to be a huge improvement over the old Ipad Air
Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2019
Bought this as a gift for my mom to replace her old Ipad Air, that she's used since 2013. All she's done since the update is complain about it. It IS faster, it is a bit larger, but it has a few 'features' that make it extremely difficult for an elderly person to use.
I'm not an apple person, one of the issues is it wants to put videos into a split window, which displays them tiny (think cell phone landscape size). What were they thinking? Who the heck needs that?
It is much faster than her original... but this is only because they sent software updates to slow the original down. I helped her set up the original Ipad Air in 2013, and it seemed exactly as fast as the new one... but after each Apple update was slower and slower. But for my elderly mom, slow is fine, she's slow anyway, so that had no impact on her.
Another thing, her old ipad had only 16 gb, this one is 256 gb. But once her original data was transferred over to this one, suddenly, her free cloud storage was full. We are talking about 1 minute after her data was transferred, with no additional use, and the system spammed her nonstop to pay to update her storage. So I clicked the $.99 per month cloud option. Not even 5 minutes of continued setup later, it claimed that storage was full, and she had to pay for $9.99 a month storage.
This is an elderly person who doesn't use it to take pictures because she doesn't know how. What is her backup cloud storage full OF? Unlike Amazon, OneDrive, or Google storage, I could not figure out even how to see this FULL storage they would not allow her to use without paying $9.99 for. Yet it wasn't full with the identical data from the original Ipad Air, the only data being 'backed up'.
I'm reviewing this from an older person's perspective, and not for someone looking for the latest and greatest, features that means nothing to her and if anything, detracted from her former enjoyment of the Air. She just wants to be able to watch Youtube videos and check her emails on a larger screen. For this, a $100 tablet would be more than enough, but she wants an Ipad Air because her friends have one.
I regret buying this for her. I incurred a cost of $9.99 a month pointless cloud storage for her to use it at all, as she has no data to back up, yet the tablet spammed her continuously until she paid for the maximum monthly fee. I don't know what she's paying for, we haven't figured out how to see this data, but pay she must to continue using this thing.
I absolutely would not buy this again, and after this experience, I will never buy another Apple product. But it's faster and bigger than the first Ipad Air, a tablet she LOVED, and which she promised to her friend after I bought this for her. I feel like I ruined her Christmas with something that's given her nothing but aggravation, but she's stuck with now, because the perfectly functional old one was gifted away when she got this from me. UGH.
