What We Chose
Apple iPad 11-inch (A16) 128GB
$399.00
Mom loves: it does the whole job for a kid, and at this price a cracked screen is an afternoon, not a crisis. The kids love: it’s theirs.
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The first iPad in this house was a hand-me-down from Grandma, and for about two years it was the most-fought-over object we owned. It got passed down a bunk bed, dropped in a driveway, and once retrieved from a bathtub that was, thankfully, empty. What it taught us was not that we needed a better iPad. It was that we needed a plan for who gets which one, and why.
The plan became the Apple iPad 11-inch. It is the one we buy when a kid ages into needing their own, because it does the whole job — school apps, the reading app, a movie in the car, a FaceTime call to Grandma — and it does it at a price where we can put it in a thick foam case and stop worrying. The A16 chip is more than a kid will ever ask of it. Our oldest edits videos on his and has never once said it was slow. When one breaks, and one will, we replace it with the same thing and nobody has to relearn anything.
Everything else on this page exists because the base iPad is wrong for someone. It is wrong for Mom, who wants the thinner Air with the nicer screen for the recipes and the family calendar she lives in. It is wrong for Dad, who needed a Pro for work and will tell you he did not need the 13-inch. It is wrong for a road trip, where the mini fits in a seat-back pocket and a toddler’s two hands. And it is more than a four-year-old needs, which is why the littlest kids start on a renewed iPad that cost less than a pair of soccer cleats.
If you want to go deeper, our tablets for kids guide covers the Fire tablets we use for the youngest, and our tablets and accessories guide has the cases, pencils and Kindles that live alongside all of this.
