iPadOS 17 Drops Support for These iPads

My 2018 11" iPad Pro lives on! Still the best bang for buck Apple purchase I've made.

My 2018 11" iPad Pro lives on! Still the best bang for buck Apple purchase I've made.

Absolutely, you took the words right out of my mouth. For a while after I bought it, I wondered if I'd overspent on an indulgence. But it's going strong, fast and smooth as ever, without only a modest amount of battery decline.

If it gets dropped by iOS 18 next year, that will be 6 years of service - not bad!

A10X chip still going strong then

I have a first generation iPad Pro 12.9” and it’s disappointing Apple is dropping ipadOS support for it as it has no problems whatsoever running ver. 16 (not sure about the smaller 9.7” first-gen Pro variant since it has half the amount of RAM the 12.9” has).

That said, I believe Apple continues releasing security updates for the previous version of iOS for a year past the release of the new version so I guess I’ll wait until next summer and see what’s available to upgrade to at that point.

I’ve read that your iPad will essentially brick and get stuck on Siri guiding you to your nearest Apple Store if your iPad doesn’t support iPadOS 17.

So if your iPad gets dropped then you have the option to either cry your eyes out here on MR or go get a new iPad.

The day iPadOS 17 drops is the last time you’ll be able to use your iPad.

You have been warned.

/s

My 2018 11" iPad Pro lives on! Still the best bang for buck Apple purchase I've made.

Yup hanging on to my 2018 11” iPad Pro. Sadly this is my 3rd one!!! First one lasted 2 years and 2 months before I accidentally dropped it with a crappy case. Ouch!! just barely out of Apple Care+ warranty. Had to pay for out of warranty replacement. Unlucky again when that replacement got cracked due to a seat belt buckle a little over a year later. Paid for out of warranty replacement again.

Both times I thought about upgrading to a newer model but the 2018 iPad pro was just that good. It was cheaper to pay for the out of warranty replacement of $499 for a 256gb LTE model than springing for equivalent newer model replacement. The newer models just didn’t add enough features or performance gains to warrant upgrading.

Here we are in 2023 and this 2018 iPad pro performs just as well as my 2022 iPhone 14 pro. Probably won’t upgrade until 2025.