Apple iPad Air (8th Gen) (2026)

A great device.....once it's up and running. If this is going to be your first ipad, you'll be pleased overall - the screen is absolutely gorgeous and clear, performance across most apps is fast and responsive. There's enough oomph under the hood of this thing to dabble is some music and video creation, and even a little bit of light 3d design. No complaints in the day to day use of this thing.

So why 3 stars? Because the initial set up process is atrocious, especially if moving from an old ipad to a newer model. At first, it looks like it'll be straightforward enough - options are clear and one of the first choices is to migrate from an old ipad. Great! Except it doesn't work. The connection process seems simple but it won't hold connection, and it needs to maintain this for over an hour to transfer. We attempted this 7 times, and it would never maintain connection - stopping at 40%, 57%, 17% etc. And you would think that if the connection dropped out you could just pick up where you left off, right? Hahaha, no, this is an APPLE product so it doesn't play that way. It needs to go through a complete lengthy re-initialisation process before each attempt.

We tried multiple suggested troubleshooting options from folks online, which included moving away from the house to rule out signal interference, as well as placing the ipads on top of each other - no good. 

So surely we could just use a cable and do it directly, yeah? Hahaha, no, this is an APPLE product and that means the transfer process couldn't possibly fail so there's no other options available.

In the end, we had to just set up the new ipad from scratch and then go through the process of transferring all of the (many many) files and projects one by one, and setting up all the apps and accounts again. And you'd think a manual file transfer process would be straightforward too? Hahaha, no, this is an APPLE product so transferring manually is a super painful process because of Apples insistence on using their woeful cloud service when there's just no need.

Meanwhile - the migration process from my ancient Samsung S20 to an S25 was straightforward and flawless - it just WORKED. 

Again - great device once it's all up and running but please be prepared for a day of frustration if attempting to migrate.