The 10th-gen iPad is matching its best price to date for Prime Day

The 10th-gen iPad is matching its best price to date for Prime Day

One of the best deals of Prime Day doesn’t require a premium membership. It’s funny how that works. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Short of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you probably won’t find a better opportunity to save on an iPad than during Amazon Prime Day. Right now, for instance, the 10th-gen iPad with Wi-Fi and 64GB of storage has dropped to an all-time low of $299 ($49 off) at Amazon and Best Buy — no membership required. The 256GB variant is also on sale at Amazon and Best Buy for a record low of $449 ($50 off), though some colors do require a Prime subscription at Amazon.

Apple’s latest entry-level iPad feels a bit more modern than the outgoing ninth-gen model, and with the current discount, it probably makes more sense to go for the newer kid on the block. Apple stretched the screen a bit to 10.9 inches and updated its design to make it look more akin to the newer iPad Air, iPad Pro, and iPad Mini models. However, in the process, it traded its Lightning connector for a USB-C port and lost the home button (the Touch ID sensor is now embedded in the power button). It also repositioned the front-facing 12MP camera so it’s centered while in landscape orientation and removed the 3.5mm audio jack, for better or worse (mostly worse).

Unless you fetishize smaller devices or have a specific need for the pro-oriented features on the iPad Air and iPad Pro, the standard iPad is an ideal choice for most people. It uses Apple’s A14 Bionic chipset, which is more than powerful enough for basic tasks like browsing, productivity, multimedia, and running a vast majority of games from the App Store. It can’t do everything the M-series chips can, however, which will exclusively support the Apple Intelligence features that will arrive as part of iPadOS 18 later this year.

If you’re coming from a ninth-gen or older iPad and you use the first-gen Apple Pencil, you won’t need to upgrade it. If you don’t already have a stylus and would appreciate the ability to write and draw, however, you can leapfrog to the Apple Pencil (USB-C), which is also on sale right now for its all-time low of $69 ($10 off) at Amazon. It’s the only other Apple Pencil that’s compatible with the newer iPad; however, it cannot magnetically charge while docked to the side of your iPad as the second-gen version can with newer tablets. Instead, you charge it by plugging it directly into your iPad. It’s not pretty, but it works.