Apple iPad (2025) review: The best iPad for most people gets even better

I am one of those hopeless iPad-as-a-computer faithful who keep buying more into the hypothetical promise than the on-ground reality. Ever since Apple put the desktop-class M1 silicon inside the iPad Pro, I have overwhelmingly shifted my workflow to Apple’s tablet.

In between the generational upgrades extending all the way to the beefy M4 iPad Pro and the M3 iPad Air, I have also spent months using the tenth-gen iPad as my primary computing machine. I survived the experience, without losing my job, but with iPadOS scars that continue to linger.

With the 11th generation iPad, Apple is not changing the fundamental formula. The price remains identical, and so does the accessory ecosystem. There’s a new processor this time around, and more internal storage on the base model — all at the same $349 asking price.

It’s a confusing slate, based on what it can technically accomplish, and what it shouldn’t be purchased to handle. What follows is a breakdown of what the 11th-gen iPad brings to the table, and how far it can go beyond the “Apple’s most affordable tablet” appeal. 

Apple iPad (2025): Specs

iPad (2025) design: Refined familiarity

The iPad’s hardware is one of its core strengths, especially at its base asking price. Once again, you get an all-metal 100% recycled aluminum chassis that comes in four colors.

The overall footprint remains unchanged, despite the screen size going from 10.9 to 11 inches. I love Apple’s understated design on the iPad, even more so than the iPad Pro, which has a sizeable camera hump at the back.

It almost feels like a bargain that this tablet costs just over $300, but serves a premium all-metal build. Tipping the scales at just a pound, the iPad is comfortable to hold, and the balanced weight distribution only adds to a secure in-hand feel.

That matters a lot, especially for a tablet that is pushed primarily as a media consumption and occasional workhorse.

Slumping on a sofa while watching Netflix or using it for extended spells during presentations, the iPad’s heft and portable size is a big win. The surface coating is also not slippery, which is a desirable trait.

Plus, it does a fairly decent job of keeping smudges at bay. I have sweaty palms, but it didn’t take too much effort to wipe the prints with a few dry swipes. I, however, strongly recommend a case or skin for the iPad.

The metal casing is pretty vulnerable on the corners, and even against slight bumps, it tends to get flattened. I’ve never had this happen to any of my tablets, except the iPads. Moreover, it’s nigh impossible to hide scratch marks on the polished metallic surface, so there’s that incentive.

The physical volume and power buttons offer satisfying clicky feedback. For authentication, Apple has once again integrated the Touch ID sensor within the power button. It’s quick, reliable, and easy to reach.

To avoid any awkward in-hand adjustments, I set up fingerprint recognition for my index finger and thumb across both hands. That way, it becomes easier to unlock the iPad, irrespective of the orientation or which hand you’re holding it in.

iPad (2025) display: Gets the job done

Just like the chassis, the display on the iPad remains unchanged. You get an 11-inch LCD panel with a 60Hz refresh rate and resolution figures of 2360 x 1640 pixels, translating to a pixel density of 264 ppi. The peak brightness also remains constant at 500 nits, and there’s a fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating on the top, as well.

For the price, it’s a good-quality screen. You can binge-watch your favorite shows and engage in marathon gaming sessions, without seeing any color-related issues. The colors look well-saturated, the contrast is fine, and the viewing angles aren’t too bad either.

Of course, compared to an OLED, the blacks aren’t as deep, but there is no unsightly light bleeding alongside the edges, which is often the case with budget-centric devices.

I did a healthy bit of image editing and tweaked a few short clips, too, without running into color disparity snags. The brightness figures are adequate unless you’re trying to read directly under the screen.

The panel is quite reflective, so you’d want to keep the brightness figures cranked up. The competition isn’t doing any better than Apple in this price segment.

For its intended target audience, the 11th-gen iPad delivers a perfectly serviceable display. It isn’t, however, without its own share of undesirable oddities. For example, it supports only the first-gen Apple Pencil and the recent model with a USB-C cap.

The second-gen Apple Pencil, and the Pro model, aren’t compatible, which means you miss out on features such as hover detection, pressure sensitivity, and barrel roll. Then there’s the display assembly itself.

It’s a non-laminated panel, which means there’s a gap between the top glass layer and the underlying display unit. As such, you can feel the hollow sound underneath when tapping with the stylus tip, and sketching doesn’t feel nearly as seamless, especially if you’ve put a glass-based screen guard on top.

A non-laminated screen is not a total dealbreaker, or outright discernible. You can go ahead with note-taking and sketching just fine. My sister has used a tenth-gen iPad extensively for labeling dental scans for a machine learning project and has never faced any glaring issues.

But if you’re used to stylus input on a laminated screen, the difference is easy to spot. What I would recommend though, is putting a screen guard on the iPad’s screen. Pronto, that is. Apple’s screens, even those with the ceramic guard, are notoriously prone to getting scratched.

The iPad is no exception. I’d recommend going with one of those thin, paper-like screen guards, or a matte protector. Overall, this display doesn’t disappoint for what you’re paying for it.

iPad (2025) performance: A smooth-sailing journey

Apple has armed the iPad with the A16 processor, which offers a 5-core CPU, a 4-core GPU, and a 16-core neural engine. It’s the same processor that we last saw on the iPhone 14 series. Based on my experience with the iPhone 14 Pro, this silicon should ideally fly on the iPad.

Well, it does so, but in somewhat weird ways.

For day-to-day tasks such as web browsing, social media surfing, streaming videos, and media editing, the tablet feels like a breeze. Editing in the Photos app is smooth, and my experience with Photoshop Express and Filmora wasn’t too bad either.

The moment you attach the Magic Keyboard and try to push it as a computer, the jitters become apparent. Apps don’t crash straight away, thankfully, but with split-screen multitasking and running a healthy few apps in the background, the signature fluidity of an Apple device is somewhat missing.

I could feel the brief stutters with switching between apps and the animals also didn’t feel as smooth, especially when compared to the fluidity of using an iPad Pro. It didn’t feel nearly as snappy as the iPad mini, which comes with the more powerful A17 Pro processor.

The background resource management seems pretty aggressive, and I noticed numerous instances where apps reloaded. I’d like to point out, however, that I was running resource hogs such as Teams, Slack, Asana, and Trello in the background, alongside a dozen browser tabs and Apple Music streaming via Bluetooth.

That’s not the kind of workload the iPad is made to handle with its limited amount of RAM, but it still got the job done. Can it manage the work that I am used to with my iPad Pro? It can, but with less fluidity and sacrificing a whole bunch of features, such as Stage Manager and Apple Intelligence.

After a brief set of edits (half a dozen transitions, text animations, and external audio overlay) on a short vertical video, the iPad took 1 minute, and 54 seconds to export the clip. The iPad Pro with the M4 silicon pulled it off in barely over 40 seconds.

That’s the kind of functional performance gap you get, but it’s not too bad, given the asking price. If you edit short clips occasionally, the iPad can handle them. Just don’t expect it to blaze through workflows in DaVinci Resolve. My first such daring attempt in LumaFusion ended up with an export crash.

Where the iPad exceeded my expectations was gaming performance. In Diablo Immortal, I had a fun time completing quests with the frame rate set to 60fps, and image resolution on High. These are not even the best graphics preset, but even with moderately high graphics settings, the device load reaches its peak value.

As far as the visual experience goes, I didn’t run into any jarring frame drops or persistent visual woes. Next, I moved to Devil May Cry: Peak of Combat, which is another graphically intensive title. I set the resolution, texture, and shadow settings to High while cranking up the frame limit to 60FPS and image quality to HD.

Once again, the game paced ahead smoothly, and even during intense melee combat segments, things were fluid. There was no worrisome heating even after sessions lasting 15-20 minutes each. The situation with Call of Duty: Mobile was not unsurprisingly smooth, as well.

The biggest surprise for me was Warframe, arguably one of the most demanding non-Metal AAA games out there. Even with the graphics settings set within the high range, the gameplay experience was deliciously trouble-free.

There was some occasional gyroscope-related detail loss, but otherwise, the space-based RPG game delivered an engaging experience on the iPad. In a nutshell, you can have an enjoyable gaming experience on the iPad, but don’t expect it to run titles like Resident Evil Village at peak graphics settings.

Coming to the benchmark figures, the eleventh-gen iPad Is roughly 48% faster at single-core and 38% faster at multi-core workflows on Geekbench. On the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress test, the new iPad is approximately 10% mightier than its predecessor.

What surprised me the most, was the impressive stability of 87.7% on the stress test, which runs a simulated graphics workflow for 20 loops. There’s only a throttling worth 9% after the first test run, and the performance remains roughly on the same line for the next 19 consecutive runs.

For comparison, Qualcomm’s latest and greatest, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, scored twice as much on the same stress test, but delivered a stability score of just 46.9%, while showing a sustained performance drop after each cycle.

The Apple tablet also runs a lot cooler than expected, especially compared to Qualcomm and MediaTek processors under sustained load. That also explains why it was able to run demanding games at respectable graphics settings with ease.

Overall, the tenth-gen iPad is a fairly reliable performer, and thanks to the native iPadOS optimizations, it runs cool and smooth. It’s just not the tablet you reach for when perks like ray-traced graphics and high visual fidelity are the prime criteria.

iPad (2025) battery: A reliable companion

Apple claims a 10-hour battery life on the iPad. In my tests, it didn’t fare any different. On days that I was not pushing it as my computing device for work, my engagement was mostly restricted to reading comics, watching videos, or reading research papers.

With that kind of recreational usage, I didn’t have to charge the iPad for two to three days in a row. The idle battery uptake on the iPad is fantastic. Moreover, enabling low-power mode doesn’t take any meaningful hit on the low-stakes usage, so you have that added incentive for battery endurance.

While working full-steam with a connected Magic Keyboard, the best per-charge mileage I got was around 6-7 hours. I had at least three chat platforms running in the background, an equal number of task management apps, an email client, music, and two browser windows.

The screen brightness usually was set around the 70% mark, with TrueTone disabled. For a device that remains fluid at that kind of workflow and costs as much, I’d say the iPad fares well in the battery department.

It’s not the fastest charging device out there, though. It takes well over two hours to fully juice up an empty tank. And to last a full day of work sitting in a cafe, I had to carry a 10,000mAh power bank on me. As far as gaming goes, it would squarely depend on the kind of titles you indulge in.

Playing Warframe at the best graphics settings possible sucked up nearly 20% battery juice in roughly half an hour. With casual games, such as Alto’s Odyssey or Donut County, you can play them on a stretch for around four to five hours, and still have some power left in the tank.

iPad (2025) software: iPadOS is fine, yet frustrating

This is where the situation gets tricky. The flavor of iPad running on the 11th Gen iPad is the vanilla experience. It’s a nicer way of saying it lacks the most advanced tricks that Apple’s tablet OS has to offer, for better or worse.

If you need an iPad primarily for entertainment, digital learning, or basic web-based work, the iPadOS 18 experience will suffice. There are, however still some chinks in the armor. For example, Android now allows a fantastic window resizing experience, while iPads are infuriatingly rigid.

Stage Manager, which gives iPadOS a makeover similar to macOS, is also missing. That perk is restricted to tablets with the M-series silicon with at least 8GB of RAM. However, that doesn’t excuse Apple’s shoddy work here. OxygenOS, for example, offers a fantastic multi-app multitask view called Open Canvas.

Samsung’s DeX mode also does a fantastic job. If you’re someone who is eyeing split-view work in landscape mode, get ready to hit the cmd+tab shortcut on the keyboard for app switching. A lot. I’ve never liked the hidden slide-away approach for the third-app window, but it might just suit your taste.

The big miss is Apple Intelligence, which again mandates a minimum of 8GB RAM and sets a performance baseline for the A17 Pro processor. The AI stack is significantly lagging behind the competition, and a healthy few features are a hit or miss.

A case can be made, however, for a few of those generative AI tricks such as Writing Tools. For a device that is often found in the backpacks of school kids, the note-taking experience could use a lift with tools like proofreading, stylistic variation, summarization, and format conversion.

It’s just funny that the gap left by Apple’s misfiring AI efforts has been quickly lapped up by Google’s Gemini, and in quite some eager fashion. Just take a look at the sheer number of control center tools tied to Gemini, which you can also put on the Lock Screen, by the way.

It’s just a cherry on top that they work reliably and deliver a much better experience than Siri, or the whole Apple Intelligence stack, in general. I can easily recommend using Gemini as the default assistant on the iPad, at least in the current shape of iPadOS.

On the positive side, iPadOS has a fantastic app ecosystem. It’s safer and more well-optimized than its Android counterparts. But at the same time, you can’t help but feel the software experience losing its innovative steam, all in the name of familiarity and reliability.

iPad (2025) verdict: An easy pick

The 11th Gen iPad is familiar, yet objectively better than the 10th Gen model. For the same price, you are now getting twice the onboard storage at 128GB and a faster processor. It has a lovely build quality, offers a sharp display, and happens to be a reliable performer.

The 12MP CenterStage front camera offers a fantastic video-calling experience. For $349, the 11th Gen iPad is a lot of tablet goodness, and overwhelmingly the best tablet deal out there. The whole hardware-software camaraderie on display here is simply unbeatable.

Where it stings is the peripheral tax. For the low-stakes computing requirement with this entry-level tablet, I can easily recommend skipping Apple’s gear and switching to options such as the excellent ESR Geo Digital Stylus and third-party keyboard case from the likes of Logitech.

Overall, you can’t go wrong with the baseline iPad in 2025, especially if getting the most value out of an investment is your primary concern.