Hello great humans of the Mac Power Users! I have a purchasing question for you. I would like to get my dad an iPad. He will use it for normal tablet-y things, but then also for cartooning, image manipulation, and maybe some other creative work. In looking at what the available hardware is right now, I am leaning towards an iPad Pro or iPad Air. I am curious, for those who know, does the additional RAM in a Pro or in the 1TB+ Pro make a real difference in performance? Is it worth the additional cost? (For reference up to this point on his iPhones I think he has hovered around maybe 60GB storage usage) I have used an iPad Air 2 which I upgraded to a Air 3 for greater storage capacity and cellular, I don’t cartoon, but I’ve never really run into a performance problem with anything I’ve tried to do. Thanks in advance for your wisdom!
I think you’ll be okay getting one of the base RAM models. For drawing and image editing, the memory limits mainly come into play when working with multiple layers in large files. It doesn’t sound like he’s going to be working at that level.
Given the space he uses, I do suggest the 11” Pro; the 128GB or 256GB Pro isn’t a big step up price-wise from the 256GB Air, and it sounds like the 64GB Air would be too little storage for his use. That gets you the base 8GB as well.
I’d say as long as you don’t want to multitask too much any of the iPads will do.
iPadOS limits the amount of RAM any 1 application can use (5Gb max), speed will be dependent on the CPU, not RAM
Thanks so much for your input! I decided to go with the 256 pro!
Thank you so much for your input! I feel better about this now.