Time to Replace iPads? – MacNN Forums

My wife has an iPad Mini 5th Generation, and I have an iPad Air 3rd Generation. After we upgraded to iPadOS 18 both of these units were noticeably slower. My Air is apparently the oldest supported Air model, while my wife’s Mini is at least one generation newer than the oldest supported Mini.

So is it time to replace mine, or both of these iPads? Given our current finances, we’d prefer to wait, but if we do replace them, is it better to get the latest models of the Air/Mini (to kick this same decision farther down the road), or to go with refurbished items a generation older (and spend less money)?

We do have model-specific keyboards, and if I’m reading things correctly I’ll have to replace my Smart Keyboard, and my wife’s generic-ish keyboard/case no matter which direction we go.

Suggestions? Advice?

The slowness is situational and has gone on since installing iPadOS 18 quite a while back. We do not notice issues with “most” activities, but somtimes, some things feel annoyingly sluggish.

But your responses have helped me reframe these issues we both have. If we don’t expect our tablets to be on a par with our perfectly good Mac laptops, the slowness isn’t a big deal.

My only remaining real concern is how long my 3rd Gen iPad Air will be supported by future OS updates. And that’s probably not a real problem until they start hinting at iPadOS 19 coming out “soon”.

Thanks for the reality check I didn’t know I was asking for.

After some careful attention to when we had slowdowns, it looks like it’s more an issue with background stuff staying active. Closing everything but the app we noticed slowness with banishes the slows – though it hasn’t given us insight into what app was sucking up processor time.

I mainly noticed slowness when browsing with Chrome. I’ve started using Firefox and DuckDuckGo (their browser) because Chrome tends to get bloaty on desktops so maybe it’s a resource hog on iPadOS? These two browsers are lighter and feel quicker on my iPad, though I haven’t been using them for very long. I guess I’ll see.