hi everyone Aaron here for ZolloTech and this is the iPad air 2 not to be
confused with the 2019 iPad air or the original iPad air this is the iPad air 2
from late 2014 and I've had it since the day it released it's been a great device
and it still works great and a lot of people keep asking me should I pick one
of these up today so I thought we'd take a look at it and the main reason for
that is its price for the 16 gigabyte of storage model it comes in only around
$100 or around 110 dollars and I'll link those in the description where I found
them for that price also it comes in at about 250 dollars for the fully loaded
64 gigabyte model with Wi-Fi and cellular so it's quite a good deal for
what you get and so I thought in this video we'll take a look at what it's
like performance wise when we're using iPad OS as you can see it's loaded here
it's an early version but it should give us an idea of the performance also I
wanted to compare it with the brand new top-of-the-line iPad pro or well the
2018 iPad pro since there hasn't been any announced at this point for 2019 and
see how they compress 4k video and how this actually plays games as well so if
you want to see all the different sections we're going to talk about take
a look in the description for the time code so you can jump around to the
section that you want to look at so the first thing obviously is the price like
I said so you could have got this in 16 32 and 64 gigabytes of storage I would
definitely recommend 32 or 64 if you're going to use this regularly from here
forward it also comes with the a8 chip set along with the m8 motion coprocessor
so it's still not very slow or anything in fact it was quite fast when it was
released it has a really nice at 9.7 inch display that's 2048 by 1536 with
264 pixels per inch and what made this display so nice the time it was released
and even today is that it is fully laminated so that means the actual glass
here is glued to the surround of the LCD underneath it it makes it seem like the
icons are right on the surface and that's how all the iPad pros come right
now the iPads if you pick them up the regular iPad does not have a display
like this the only disadvantage to a laminated
display is if you crack this glass generally you have to replace the glass
and the LCD together but for $100 you're better off just buying another iPad if
it's that bad unfortunately now it's also anti reflective so the display has
a coating on it that makes it less reflective than some of the other iPads
and then also it has all the functions of a current modern iPad if you were to
buy a 20-18 iPad right now from 2018 or 2019 right now you'll find that the
display looks basically just as good it's just lacking a couple features and
some of those features it actually has that other iPads don't have so let's
talk about the outside of it and see what it has so obviously on the back
you've just got the nice aluminum finish on the side you still get your volume
buttons and your microphone your power sleep/wake button and it has a headphone
jack so that's something some of the new iPad pro devices don't have on the
bottom you have dual speakers here along with a lightning connector to charge it
and then touch ID on the front and it works nice and fast you'll see it
unlocked there no problem and then you've got two cameras now the forward
facing camera isn't really anything to talk about you'll see there is a little
bit of lag here let's turn it around it's only a 1.2 megapixel camera so it's
really not that great but it's good for FaceTime the rear camera on this is a
little bit better it's an 8 megapixel camera that does 1080p so if you're
recording video it's going to look pretty decent actually so we'll turn
this around you throw an iPhone in the background here and it actually takes
halfway decent photos now I wouldn't use this for taking serious photos because
you probably have an iPhone and that's usually better unless it's a really old
one but overall it's actually quite good when it comes to photos for just
recreational use now of course being a little bit older
there's that adage that Apple slows things down well it actually feels quite
fast so let me rotate it here we'll set it down and what you'll see is if we
scroll back and forth scrolling is nice and fast now it does not have the
120 Hertz super fast display that the newer iPads Pro have but it does have
the 60 frame per second display that even the most recent iPads have so you
can pull in here if you have iOS 13 you've got all your widgets and things
on the side everything's nice and responsive no issues here if we open an
app up maybe it will open shortcuts up it loads fairly quickly maybe it will
open music up here and you'll see there's a little bit of lag the first
time you open it but overall it's quite usable no issues there it also still
supports split view so if you want to open a webpage and then open maybe the
app store on the side or something else you can do that resize it you could open
a Pages document and do the same thing or get rid of it altogether you can also
bring in another app here if we want to bring in shortcuts that we just had open
we can bring it even on either side here and they both work just fine so it's
actually surprisingly fast for its age now if we go home and then swipe up it
will remember our saved State so we've got that as well so it's actually very
modern as far as all of its features they're all the same as any of the
current iPads so quite nice there now if we take a look at a couple games let's
go ahead and open minecraft and I just want to show you how it works because
this is something that while I personally don't play this all the time
my kids play it constantly in fact this was my number one used device for my
wife for a while until she got a pro so she's a little bit slower than I am to
upgrade to new devices and she really liked this one until I showed her the
pro which is a little bit faster so you'll see minecraft is taking a little
bit of time to actually load there we go we'll hit continue we'll hit play and
we'll just load this world I guess and now we're in and we can walk around do
whatever you want and minecraft just like you could on any other device the
frame rates are quite good you'll see it moves fast it actually will work with a
controller so if you have a Bluetooth controller and even a a Xbox or ps4
controller it should work just fine if you have an Xbox one ass controller
you'll see it moves around nicely the frame rates are
hi and then we can go home and then maybe open even something like fortnight
will run no problem now it is a little bit slow sometimes to open and load
overall but in general it's still very playable now for tonight's working fine
it did take quite a bit of time to load it the first time but you'll see it
works fine frame rates are okay it's completely playable no issues here and
let's go over here I'm not going to play through a full
game but just want to show you that it's it's definitely something you could play
no issues here whatsoever so it should work fine for you if this is your game
and one you want to play regularly you should have no issues there you can go
home maybe we'll go back into Minecraft and it may have to reload due to the
amount of RAM that this has it is a little bit low on RAM as far as its
memory is concerned storage is ok but you'll see the full game has to load
again so if we go back to fortnight it still resumes even though I tried to low
load minecraft so it's still actually ok and usable like I said now for doing
things that are creative it works great but it does not have Apple pencil
support so if you want to use the Apple pencil you're out of luck with this
particular device but if that doesn't matter to you you're fine as far as the
iPad air 2 is concerned especially again like I said around that a 100 to 200
dollar mark if you could get one of these it's actually a good buy but I
wanted to show you one more test that's the hardest test for this particular
device and that is exporting 4k video so let me go ahead and close all of the
apps and open iMovie on the Left I have the iPad air 2 and I've closed all the
apps in the background and I've only got iMovie open and the same is true on the
right with the 12 point 9 inch iPad pro from 2018 so we've got all the apps
closed in the background and we have the same clip loaded if we go to the end
you'll see it's 3 minutes and 46 seconds it's 4k and it was recorded with an
iPhone so let's go ahead and export these and see how they compare going
from the oldest device to one of the newest devices so let's go ahead and
export them and I'll bring in a stopwatch here so we can kind of keep
track and see how fast they actually export together both videos also have
titles on them let's go to share them and we'll save the video
and we'll save it to 4k so let's see if I can hit these at the same time as the
stopwatch here and let's see how long they take to export
now I'll speed this up for you so you don't have to wait as long of course
as you can see the iPad pro was a little bit quicker and exporting but not
exponentially not even by double so that's pretty impressive considering the
age of the iPad air battery life of the iPad air 2 is quite good when you get
one of these new expect 8 to 10 hours after 4 plus years of use it's still
quite good it will get you through 8 hours no problem especially if you're
watching video that you've purchased through iTunes or whatever you're using
this for it's actually going to hold up quite well so if you're watching any of
the TV shows or anything you can get in the TV library it will last even longer
after its downloaded if you're playing games it's going to be less but that's
ok it's the same on all of the modern iPads and expect the same battery on the
new iPads that you get with this one and vice versa so it's quite good so the
iPad air 2 holds up much better than you would expect for such an older device
and I would definitely recommend it if you could get it around one to two
hundred dollars however once you get over that price there's better options
that are faster and newer and will also support the Apple pencil if that's
something you're interested in but for what it is it's a great device
especially around that lower price point today and how long it's supported as far
as iPad OS it's hard to say if they'll support it with iPad OS 14 when iOS 14
comes out in a year or more but with iOS right now and iPad OS it's
quite good and I would definitely recommend it it's great for watching
video for playing games such as fortnight or Mario run or minecraft or
even using creative apps if you use your finger with that or even one of the
touch styluses it's really quite good so I would highly recommend it if even if
you want to edit some 4k video it will handle it but let me know what you think
in the comments below do you think it's still worth picking up and of course you
can get this in a couple different colors as well you have the silver space
grey and gold option for this particular device let me know what you think in the
comments below of course I'll link this wallpaper in
the description as I always do and if you haven't subscribed already please
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videos as soon as they're released if you enjoyed this video please give it a
like as always thanks for watching this is Aaron I'll see you next time