It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas for the most demanding Apple fans out there, who’ve been able to save a little bit of dough on the newest 11-inch iPad Pro powerhouse for a short while and can now do the same as far as last year’s 12.9-inch colossus is concerned as well.
The difference is… absolutely massive in terms of actual discounts, and since the iPad Pro 12.9 (2021) edition looks pretty much identical to its 2022 successor, it’s hard not to view the “oldie” as the better overall deal.
Originally priced at an understandably high $1,099.99 in an entry-level 128GB storage configuration and repeatedly marked down by $100 or $200 in multiple variants in the last few months, the fifth-gen iPad Pro 12.9 is currently available from Best Buy for as little as $799.99.
That will obviously still only get you the aforementioned minimum amount of local digital hoarding room, but the same unprecedented (and unbeatable) $300 price reduction is good at the time of this writing for the 256 gig variant as well.
That one typically costs $1,199.99, which means you can have it for $899.99 right now with no questions asked and no strings attached in silver and space gray colors, while going all the way up to 512 gigs of storage space only requires an extra Benjamin after a positively dreamy $400 pre-Black Friday markdown.
That’s right, you can save as much as 400 bucks compared to both the original price of a 512GB iPad Pro 12.9 (2021) and the current price of a 2022 model with the same amount of internal storage space, and there are no device trade-ins involved and no jumping through any sort of hoops whatsoever.
Naturally, the iPad Pro 12.9 (2022) does hold a couple of advantages over its predecessor, but the most notable is… not that significant in the grand scheme of things, as the hot new M2 processor improves the already impressive raw power of the Apple M1 by around 20 percent. And $300 or $400 are far larger numbers than 20 percent.
