Apple iPad Air 2014 Apple iPad Air 2 9.7" Display 16GB Storage Review

The 2014 iPad Air 2 is a ten-year-old tablet sold refurbished for about $110. Its only real advantage is the price and Apple build quality. The 16GB storage is crippling and the processor is painfully slow. Only consider it as a ultra-basic, single-use screen or a beater tablet for a kid. Everyone else should look at a newer used iPad or a Fire HD 10.

Let's be real straight away: this is a 2014 iPad Air 2. It's a ten-year-old tablet. But here's the interesting part—it's still selling, and people are still buying it for around $110. That tells you something. This isn't for someone chasing the latest tech. It's for the person who needs a simple, reliable screen for reading, light web browsing, or handing to a kid, and doesn't want to spend more than a pair of jeans costs.

What you're getting is a piece of Apple history that still feels surprisingly good. The aluminum body is thin and light, and that 9.7-inch Retina display, while not cutting-edge, is still perfectly fine for most everyday stuff. It runs an old version of iPadOS, which means app support is dwindling, but the core Apple apps still work.

The whole value proposition hinges on it being 'Amazon Renewed.' That means it's been tested, cleaned, and comes with a 90-day warranty. You're not buying a mystery box from a random eBay seller. You're getting a known quantity with a safety net, which for a device this old, is pretty much the only way to buy it.

Performance is where the age shows, and our data backs that up. The A8X chip and 2GB of RAM (the specs list 16GB RAM, but that's incorrect for this model; it has 2GB) land in the 7th and 90th percentiles respectively in our rankings. That's a confusing spread until you realize the RAM score is likely a data error—this thing has very little RAM by today's standards. In practice, the CPU is one of the worst we've seen for modern tasks. It'll handle basic web browsing and video streaming okay, but try to have more than a couple of apps open or load a complex website, and you'll feel the lag.

The GPU is also a weak spot, sitting in the 11th percentile. Don't expect to play any games beyond the simplest puzzles. Where it does okay is in features and build quality—those scores are high because, well, it's an iPad. The design was great for its time. But the storage is a massive bottleneck at just 16GB, placing it in the 3rd percentile. You'll be managing your space constantly after the OS and a few apps take their share.

For $110, you're not buying cutting-edge tech. You're buying a portal. It's a screen that runs Netflix, lets you check email, and can survive being dropped by a toddler better than a $300 Kindle Fire. The value is entirely in the price and the Apple ecosystem lite. Compared to a brand-new budget Android tablet at the same price, you're trading modern speed and software for a much nicer build and that Apple interface. Just know you're trading a lot of speed and functionality for it.

If you're looking at this, you should also look at the Amazon Fire HD 10. For the same money, you get a newer, faster processor, more storage, and a brighter, larger 10-inch screen. The trade-off is you're deep in the Amazon ecosystem with ads, and the build quality is all plastic. It feels cheaper, but it performs better for video and games.

Another competitor is a used, newer iPad, like a 2018 6th Gen iPad. You might find one for $150-$200. For that extra $40-$90, you get a massively faster processor, support for the Apple Pencil 1, and iPadOS 17. It's a much more capable and future-proof device. The trade-off is you're spending more and might be buying from a private seller without a warranty. The iPad Air 2 is the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel entry point into an iPad.

Skip this iPad if you need a primary tablet for anything beyond the most basic tasks. Students should skip it—it's too slow for research, multitasking, or note-taking. Aspiring digital artists should skip it—the Pencil support is technically there but practically useless. Anyone who gets frustrated by laggy interfaces or constant 'Storage Almost Full' alerts should skip it. If you fall into any of these camps, your $110 is better spent on an Amazon Fire HD 10 for a much smoother, more capable media experience, or you should budget closer to $200 for a used 2018 or newer iPad, which is a completely different and usable device.

We can only recommend this iPad Air 2 for two very specific people. First, someone who needs a secondary, disposable screen for a single simple task—like a dedicated recipe tablet in the kitchen, a video monitor for a baby's room, or a web browser for a guest room. Second, a parent looking for a incredibly cheap first tablet for a young child where you genuinely don't care if it gets broken.

For literally anyone else—students, artists, people who want to browse the web smoothly, anyone who needs to install more than five apps—this is a hard pass. The lack of storage and glacial speed will drive you nuts within a week. Save up a little more and get a newer used iPad or a modern budget Android tablet. Your patience will thank you.