Apple iPad 9th gen (2021) review

Familiar OS, with some quality of life and productivity features

The iPad 10.2 (2021) ships with iPadOS 15 out of the box. If you have used an iPad in the last few years, you will find everything largely familiar and feel right at home. Not much has changed, yet there are some noteworthy new additions. Nothing truly revolutionary. Not even close to the scale some people were hoping for out of 2021 iPads, now that the top-of-the-line model has Apple's flagship M1 chip inside it and more performance than some of the company's MacBook computers. Unfortunately, the lofty ambitions of full OSX apps and things like running Final Cut Pro on the iPad remain a pipe dream for now. Perhaps in a few years, or maybe Apple just wants to keep the two device categories segmented and continues just offering slightly better iOS app experiences on tablet. Only the future will tell.

Anyway, we'll go through some of the more significant new additions and changes. In no particular order, widgets are now first-class citizens in iOS 15. No longer are they relegated to their own dedicated slideover area, but you can now place them freely anywhere on the home screens.

Widgets can now go on the home screens

Widget can come in different sizes, including a new huge banner size. You have the ultimate freedom to experiment and craft something useful to you, personally. You can mix and match app shortcuts and widgets or even have home screens dedicated to just widgets. Your call.

New huge widget size

By the way, the familiar slide over widget strip that appears when you swipe left from the leftmost homescreen is still there and functions as before.

Older widget interface is still there

Another great convenience feature that is part of iPadOS 15 is the App library. You can get to it by swiping right from your rightmost home screen or from an optional shortcut on the Dock.

App library

It is essentially Apple's long-overdue answer to Android's long-standing app drawer. By default, you get a nifty, automatically categorized folder structure, but you can also search your apps and get a simple alphabetized list to choose from.

There are also a few behavioral settings related to the App Library, found under Settings->Home Screen and Dock. Here you can choose whether you want newly-installed apps to just be added to the App library or get a shortcut on the home screen, as well. Understandably, this is the default behavior for consistency.

You can also choose whether to have notification badges on your app icons within App library. And that optional App library shortcut for the Dock is also toggled from here.

Home Screen and Dock settings

Split screen, or multi-tasking, depending on how you chose to interpret each term's meaning is, naturally present in iPadOS 15 and mostly works just like before. However, Apple has worked hard to try and make its features more "visible", apparent and convenient for users. First off, apps now have three dots near the top of their UI as a constant fixture. Clicking those offers three app "states", for lack of a better term. The first is full screen, clicking the second collapses the app temporarily to one side and asks you to select a second app for a two-app vertical split.

Two-app split screen

While technically not "true multitasking," this is an ideal setup for doing things like copy-pasting or reading a source of some sort and taking notes. You get the idea. The split, like before, can be adjusted, with some limitations. In vertical orientation, you can only have a 1:2 or 2:1 split. To get a 50% split down the middle, you need to hold the iPad horizontally. We guess that makes some sense, though we would like to see some more "free-form" window behavior from Apple one of these days.

Adjusting the two-app split

If you minimize a split-screen setup of two apps, they stay as a pair in your recent apps and can be quickly called back, which is great. Sort of like a temporary app pair.

However, in an attempt to further simplify this split-screen behavior, iPadOS 15 now lets you drag one app from the recent app screen onto another and start a split-screen that way. Neat!

Starting split screen from recent apps

Some apps, notably Safari, even allow you to open multiple instances and have them in a split-screen setup. Safari even has this nifty option where it shows you a list of all your currently open tabs as separate instances with the same ability to drag and drop one onto another for a split-screen view.

Safari tabs can be split screen apps

Circling back to the three dots at the top of each app and the third and final option. This will be familiar to Apple users already. It is called "slide over" and it basically creates a tall, "skinny" version of the app that hovers over your otherwise active app or even a split of two other active apps and can get dragged around from the left to right side. But, again, not really fully adjusted and in a free-form fashion. You can't even resize the window. It is just "there".

Slideover apps

Slideover apps get their own dedicated carousel of recent apps if you have more than one open. But they also appear in this elongated fashion as entries in the general Recent Apps interface as well.

Slideover apps

Again, most of this is not radically new in core functionality, it is just presented in a different, arguably more convenient fashion.

The Notes app has gotten truly powerful in its latest version within iPadOS 15. Powerful dragging and dropping, as well as the seamless selection, copy and paste features, have been a strong suit of Apple software for some time now.

You get to see the full power of those systems in action with Notes, especially now that you can swipe from the bottom right angle of the display regardless of where you are inside the UI and spawn a new Quick note.

Quick notes

Quick notes are actually their own category and get saved separately in the Notes app. The benefits of having a notes window hovering on top of whatever else you are doing are numerous. You can, of course, take quick notes manually, but also copy paste and drag and drop pretty much any element you desire right into the note - text, images, links. It all works.

Quick notes

Better still, there are some powerful hidden features here as well, like the one-tap ability to paste in the current URL you are on if you open a quick note while browsing a page. Or the ability to select a part of the page and then save not just the text to the note but the text with a link. When you open said link, the highlighted text is still highlighted. Pretty nifty stuff.

And Notes gets more powerful still when you add an Apple Pencil to the mix and things like handwriting recognition.

The Safari web browser has a pretty neat new addition in iPadOS 15 - extensions. You can find a dedicated menu for them in settings, which redirects you to a web repository, already full of quite a few interesting entries.

Safari extension

Naturally, you get things like ad blockers, but also some powerful and less morally ambiguous extensions like Grammarly or Honey. Just to make it clear, though, you can't just install any extension on the iPad that you could on a desktop Safari browser, though most of the big names are already here, and we only expect to see more in the future.

While this sounds like a relatively small feature on the surface, its scope has the potential to massively improve productivity and quality of life for many users. Especially power users that need advanced functionality on the web. Better still, web browsers with extensions have been struggling to get things right and offer enough freedom on Android for years, with few standout efforts on the matter, like Samsung's browser and Firefox still trying hard to get extensions right but not quite there yet.

Speaking of quality-of-life features, we would be remiss not to mention Notification summary. The name is perfectly self-explanatory. You go into your notification settings, select apps that might be a bit too frequent on the notification end or you simply don't want to deal with during certain hours, but still want to get alerts from eventually and put them on a scheduled summary to consume at your leisure.

Notification summary

Again, a potentially game-changing feature for some users that while can be mimicked quite successfully with third-party tools and tinkering is yet to appear as a core Android feature.

You can take things a step further in terms of notification filtering and go beyond that with the Focus feature. The way it works is that you have different focus scenes or profiles, each meant for you to be focusing on a particular activity. By default, a Do Not Disturb profile is defined, as well as one Work and another Personal one, but you can also activate any number of additional ones for things like gaming or make an entirely custom one.

Focus mode

Focus modes can be triggered automatically based on a simple schedule or based on your current location, or after you open a specific app. There is even a Smart Activation option that will try its best to learn which profile to apply under certain repeated conditions.

Triggering Focus modes

The Focus modes themselves come with a number of customizable limiters, so to say. You can limit which apps get to send you notifications or which contacts get to punch through to you. You can also choose which apps to allow in every mode. You can even create a home screen of shortcuts and widgets for a given mode and only have it available.

Focus Mode settings

It is a truly powerful system, though one that can get quite confusing if you don't take the time to properly set it up and understand what it is doing. We feel like remedial users will just shy away from it altogether since it would be relatively easy to accidentally lock yourself out of certain apps or people by accident.

Performance

The iPad 10.2 (2021) or 9th gen iPad, as it is also known, might have inherited practically every aspect of its design and build from its predecessor, but it did get an incremental chipset upgrade. It's, unfortunately, not equipped with the latest and greatest Apple A15 Bionic like the iPhone 13 family, as well as the new iPad mini (2021) announced alongside it. Instead, it gets a bump up from the A12 Bionic to the A13 Bionic.

It may be a small upgrade, but it's not insignificant. The A13 chip still has a hexa-core CPU configuration, like its predecessor, but is based on a slightly better 7nm+ manufacturing process and uses different CPU cores: 2x2.65 GHz Lightning + 4x1.8 GHz Thunder. There are also four ambiguously named Apple GPU cores on board for graphics

Just like the 8th and 7th gen iPads, this new 9th gen still has just 3GB of RAM. Even with Apple's formidable closed-ecosystem optimization, 3GB of RAM is a bit of a bottleneck nowadays, particularly for multitasking.

On a more positive note, the base storage is now bumped up to 64GB, which is the model we are testing.

Now, running synthetic benchmarks on any hardware with the intent of gauging real-world performance is flawed even on the best of days. Still, it is the best and most controlled and repeatable way we have to at least get some figures that can then be compared against other devices, doing the exact same tests and workloads. While this applies universally, Apple devices are just way fewer in total number for us to accumulate any substantial database.

Also, there is the matter of benchmark comparability across different hardware architectures and designs, as well as different OS environments. In general, that introduces such a massive extra layer of variables that the already approximate synthetic numbers become even less comparable. Keep that in mind as we kick things off with some pure-CPU loads and GeekBench.

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2020)
  4709
• Apple iPhone 13
  4645
• Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2018)
  4584
• Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max
  4240
• Apple iPhone 12
  4067
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max
  3503
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro
  3466
• Huawei MatePad 11
  3282
• Apple iPhone SE (2020)
  3237
• Apple iPad 10.2 (2021)
  3124
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+
  2690
• Xiaomi Pad 5
  2583
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE
  1904
• Realme Pad
  1236

We did our best to include a nice mix of Apple devices, which should provide relatively comparable scores, as well as some competing Android tablets, which don't quite do so due to a number of factors. Still, seeing how all of the gadgets were still tasked with the same exact straight computational workloads, any underlying architectural hardware or software differences are a valid factor to consider in an absolute comparative sense. Not that anybody will conceivably be using any of the devices to simply crunch Pi over and over again, but our point for a relatively fair, even if flawed comparison stands.

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13
  1727
• Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max
  1606
• Apple iPhone 12
  1605
• Apple iPhone SE (2020)
  1334
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro
  1333
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max
  1332
• Apple iPad 10.2 (2021)
  1328
• Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2020)
  1121
• Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2018)
  1113
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+
  959
• Huawei MatePad 11
  920
• Xiaomi Pad 5
  743
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE
  615
• Realme Pad
  340

In any case, we can at least verify that the iPad 10.2 (2021) is making proper use of the CPU cores in its A13 Bionic, since both the iPhone 11 Pro Max and the iPhone SE (2020), rocking the same chip, manage very similar scores.

Comparability across devices gets muddied even further when we start to add graphics benchmarks into the mix. Simply put, for a while now, Apple has been using and constantly improving its own graphics API, called Metal - specifically designed to make the most out of its hardware, often at a much lower level than industry-standard alternatives. Android, on the other hand, still uses said industry-standard APIs, like OpenGL ES and Vulkan. We won't get into the matter any further, but we will note that AnTuTu, as executed on the iPad 10.2 (2021) does use Metal. Approach the following scores accordingly.

Overall, it does look like the 9th generation iPad is not strapped for graphics processing power and holds its own well.

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13
  775519
• Apple iPhone 12
  692020
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+
  655528
• Huawei MatePad 11
  639631
• Apple iPad 10.2 (2021)
  617292
• Xiaomi Pad 5
  555079
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE
  355430
• Realme Pad
  226474

GFXBench tests are in the exact same boat - the app uses the Metal API on Apple devices and a mix of OpenGL ES and Vulkan on Android. Hence, the previous point of scores not being directly comparable definitely stands, but we would argue that there is still some merit to mixing and matching the numbers like this, since despite clear hardware and software differences, all devices were still asked to render the exact same set of scenes. Still, to keep things are clean as possible, we are just including Apple devices in the graphics-only benchmark charts.

GFX Manhattan 3.0 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2018)
  239
• Apple iPhone 13
  222
• Apple iPhone 12
  195
• Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max
  194
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max
  179
• Apple iPhone 11
  179
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro
  178
• Apple iPad 10.2 (2021)
  170
• Apple iPhone XS Max
  130
• Apple iPhone XS
  114
• Apple iPad Pro
  62.5

GFX Manhattan 3.0 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2018)
  100
• Apple iPad 10.2 (2021)
  60
• Apple iPhone XS
  60
• Apple iPhone XS Max
  60
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max
  60
• Apple iPhone 11
  60
• Apple iPhone 12
  60
• Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max
  60
• Apple iPhone 13
  60
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro
  60
• Apple iPad Pro
  29.4

Comparing on-screen scores across devices, even just Apple ones has its own set of issues, mostly due to resolution differences. Apple has never been one to go for standard resolutions, instead choosing appropriate aspects for the UI to look its best.

GFX Manhattan 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2018)
  181
• Apple iPhone 13
  150
• Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max
  135
• Apple iPhone 12
  132
• Apple iPhone 11
  121
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max
  120
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro
  118
• Apple iPad 10.2 (2021)
  104
• Apple iPhone XS Max
  99
• Apple iPhone XS
  98

GFX Manhattan 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2018)
  66
• Apple iPhone XS
  60
• Apple iPhone XS Max
  60
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max
  60
• Apple iPhone 11
  60
• Apple iPhone 12
  60
• Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max
  60
• Apple iPhone 13
  60
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro
  60
• Apple iPad 10.2 (2021)
  55

GFX Car Chase 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2018)
  102
• Apple iPhone 13
  98
• Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max
  78
• Apple iPhone 11
  76
• Apple iPad 10.2 (2021)
  70
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max
  67
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro
  66
• Apple iPhone XS
  60
• Apple iPhone XS Max
  60
• Apple iPhone 12
  58

GFX Car Chase 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 11
  60
• Apple iPhone 13
  59
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max
  57
• Apple iPhone 11 Pro
  57
• Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max
  55
• Apple iPhone 12
  53
• Apple iPhone XS
  47
• Apple iPhone XS Max
  47
• Apple iPad 10.2 (2021)
  44
• Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2018)
  39

Still, looking at all the numbers, particularly the off-screen ones, we can see that the iPad 10.2 (2021) almost manages to match the scores of the iPhone 11. The small difference in FPS could be down to a lower clock speed in the iPad or perhaps some other hardware differences. Though, it is impossible to say exactly since Apple just doesn't go into any additional hardware details for the chip.

GFX Aztek High (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13
  55
• Apple iPhone 12
  45
• Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max
  42
• Apple iPhone XS
  36
• Apple iPad 10.2 (2021)
  33
• Apple iPhone XS Max
  32
• Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2018)
  31

GFX Aztek High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max
  40
• Apple iPhone 13
  34
• Apple iPad 10.2 (2021)
  32

As far as we know, both devices use the same Apple A13 Bionic with a 4-core "Apple GPU", whatever that means.

3DMark Wild Life (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13
  8986
• Apple iPhone 12
  7996
• Apple iPad 10.2 (2021)
  7537

At least it is good to see that the 9th generation iPad is not starved for power and can still hold its own reasonably well. Even if not as well as we might have expected from an A13 Bionic, based on previous experience.

We ran some throttling tests, as well, just to see how well the A13 Bionic is being cooled in this new tablet home and are happy to report that it thermal-throttled to a very reasonable 86.7% of its performance with a combined CPU and GPU load. The fps chart showed no sudden drops or stutters, either, which is what you want to see.

Throttling tests

Not that this comes as a major surprise, given the huge volume available for cooling on the iPad 10.2 (2021), as well as the fact that the surface tablet never managed to get even slightly toasty under load.

So, overall, there is nothing particularly surprising, concerning or for that matter exciting about the performance numbers on the iPad 10.2 (2021). Some practical observations of the perceived performance and experience are in order here, though, since most Apple users aren't buying a new gadget because of the extra power its chipset has. That is particularly true for the target audience of the vanilla iPad.

We personally found it to be perfectly usable. In terms of snappiness and fluidity of the UX as a whole, it is naturally nowhere near devices with the bleeding-edge A15 Bionic. You can get the occasional stutter when opening or scrolling a particularly heavy website or app, and stutters are a relatively frequent occurrence when multitasking. That being said, we didn't find a particular use case or app that rendered it totally unusable. Perhaps, that might be a valid consideration in the long run, seeing how new OS updates have been known to slow down older yet still supported Apple hardware in the past. For now, though, with iPadOS 15 on board, the iPad 10.2 (2021) delivers a perfectly reasonable and usable, even if basic, overall experience.