Today’s a good day to head over to Amazon if you’ve held back on buying the 9.7-inch iPad because you’ve felt like an iPad Pro would be better suited to your needs. The retailer currently has a Gold Box Deal of the Day on previous-generation refurbished 64GB iPad Pros with Wi-Fi and it’s offering them in space gray, silver, rose gold, or gold for anywhere from 18 to 22 percent off.
For the 10.5-inch model, that’ll get you a 64GB model for $429.99, down from the usual listed price of $549. (It sold for $649 at launch in 2017.) For comparison, that’s only $100 more than the retail price you’ll pay for the starting model of Apple’s non-Pro 9.7-inch iPad.
If you want to upgrade to the larger 12.9-inch display, you can snag it today for $559.99, down $119 from the normal price of $679.
Each model has an Apple 10X chip that’s still quite capable of handling any app you throw its way (although I’m not sure how well it’ll handle full Adobe Photoshop when it eventually comes to the iPad sometime this year). At the moment, at least, there’s no pressing reason why this model is inferior to the latest iPad Pros in everyday practice. The only things you’ll miss out on are nifty new additions like Face ID (which admittedly greatly simplifies some actions on the iPad) or the future-proofing of the latest iPad Pro’s blazing processor.
If you need more information, be sure to check out our glowing review from 2017. As we said at the time: ”If you prefer your main computer to easily hook up to a printer, or get files from a thumb drive, or access any other third-party peripherals that did not originate in Cupertino, a MacBook Pro may be a better fit. But Apple is even making its laptops more like a tablets. The 12-inch MacBook notoriously has only one USB-C port, and that has definitely hindered my experience. However, for some reason, the same limitations have not been as frustrating on the iPad Pro. Maybe because I know from the get-go that I won’t be able to do a lot of traditional computing.”
Author: Leif Johnson, Contributing Writer
Leif is a San Francisco-based tech journalist. He's a big fan of fantasy RPGs, and you can find his previous work on IGN, Rolling Stone, VICE, PC Gamer, Playboy, Mac|Life, TechRadar, and numerous other publications.