Apple has officially showcased their new 9.7-inch iPad 2018 at an event held in Chicago. The Cupertino based company though was mostly focused on educational things rather than hardware. Despite that, the new iPad is something a student would mostly look after, especially since it now supports Apple Pencil.
Albeit the upgrade it is to iPad 9.7 (2017), the new iPad looks pretty similar to it. Apple has made changes in its display and digitizer to support Apple Pencil but rest assured the external seems untouched — including its resolution at 1536 x 2048 pixels.
Internally, it sees a minor hardware upgrade. The iPad now has A10 Fusion chipset. It offers 40% better performance in CPU and 50% in GPU compared to the A9 chipset as seen on the previous iPad. However, the A10 Fusion chipset is still not up to the mark with Apple’s latest A11 Bionic chipset which can be seen on the latest iPhone X.
Rest assured, there’s little to no changes at all. The camera is still intact at 8MP with f/2.4 lens, a 1.4MP front camera, a metal body and a plastic covering at the top if in case you choose the cellular model.
As for the pricing, the new 9.7-inch iPad 2018 will carry a price tag of $329 for the 32GB WiFi model and $459 for the 32GB cellular model. There’s also a 128GB variant which is expected to cost $100 more. However, the iPad mainly targeted to the student can be purchased for $299 if in case you happen to run a school in the US.
There’s also a free 200GB of free iCloud storage for students as opposed to the normal 5GB one. That’s some generous offer from Apple to students.
