Summer has been great so far, but unfortunately it won’t last forever. That means school and college will soon be back to normal and you may find yourself needing a tablet or laptop for studying. Let’s take a look at what Apple products Amazon has to offer.
Let’s start with the 2021 Apple iPad – it’s the cheapest option and still does a good job. The Apple A13 Bionic chipset is showing its age, but this isn’t a gaming tablet – the important thing is that it still gets iPadOS updates. It’s worth noting that this is the last version with a Lightning connector, which could be a good or bad thing, depending on whether you’ve switched to USB-C charging cables.
The 2022 Apple iPad offers more processing power with an A14 Bionic processor and an extra gigabyte of RAM. More importantly, it has USB-C with DisplayPort. The display is also slightly larger (10.9″ vs. 10.2″), and both support the original Apple Pencil. The 2022 model is about $100 more expensive than the 2021 model, though.
Apple may be ditching the mini-tablet form factor — it’s been three years and there’s no new model. Yes, the latest iPad mini is from 2021, but it’s still faster than both of the above tablets with the Apple A15 chip. It also has a USB-C 3.1 port with DisplayPort, so its age isn’t all that important (unless you were hoping for a faster-than-60Hz display).
For more serious tasks, Apple’s two iPad Air models from May of this year offer the powerful Apple M2 chip. They come in 11-inch and 13-inch sizes, both with IPS LCD displays—and both running at 60Hz. Plus, thanks to a USB-C port with DisplayPort support and support for Stage Manager, these tablets can multitask on an external display. The differences between the 11-inch and 13-inch models are the displays (of course), but also the battery capacity. The rest is the same.
For even more power and better displays, Apple’s new iPad Pros feature Apple’s latest M4 chip (they’re still the only ones with it) and tandem OLED displays. That means there are two OLED panels stacked on top of each other to double the light output.
And if you’re going to be doing serious work, you might want a decent keyboard—Apple’s Magic Keyboard case practically turns iPad Pros into laptops. But there’s one thing that holds it back.
iPadOS simply isn’t as efficient as macOS. That brings us to the 2024 MacBook Airs. They come in 13.6-inch and 15.3-inch sizes and are powered by Apple’s M3 chipset. Amazon has 8/256GB and 16/512GB configurations. Unlike their M2-based predecessors, these can support two external displays when the lid is closed. And thanks to passive cooling alone, they’re as quiet as they come.
If you’re looking to build a desktop setup, the 2023 Apple Mac mini has an M2 chipset and is available in 8/256GB and 8/512GB configurations. There’s a version with an M2 Pro chip that increases the number of CPU cores (from 4+4 to 6+4) and the number of GPU cores (from 10 to 16).
That’s it for Apple gadgets. Here are three deals that look too good to pass up, even if they don’t have an Apple logo.
First up, Amazon is selling the Samsung Galaxy S24+ and Galaxy S24 Ultra with $200 gift cards. It should be noted that the 256GB Galaxy S24 Ultra also has a regular discount of $125.
Google also killed the Chromecast brand this week with the launch of the Google TV Streamer, which was a bit disappointing to find out uses the same chipset as 2021’s Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max.
The 2023 versions of the Fire TV Stick 4K and 4K Max still use the same chipset, and the new Max even offers a slight increase in clock speeds. And they cost significantly less than the TV Streamer — especially now that they’re on sale. They offer better wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi 6 in 4K and Wi-Fi 6E in 4K Max, compared to Wi-Fi 5 in the TV Streamer), but they lack a gigabit Ethernet option (the official adapter only supports 100Mbps).
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