Apple has always put the absolute least amount of memory in these tablets they could get away with, around ~half of competitors. They made up for it with very

Apple has always put the absolute least amount of memory in these tablets they could get away with, around ~half of competitors. They made up for it with very tight memory management optimizations. That worked for a while, but the world has moved on to bloated websites and apps using up cheap memory. In short, with fixed-size soldered memory, obsolescence of these tablets was pre-determined at the outset. Not much after our iPad 2 purchase, we needed to buy two MBPs around 2013. They also came with soldered RAM at that point. I made a special point to insist both be purchased with 16GB of RAM. A few people scoffed, salesperson said it wasn't necessary. Our late 2013 is still running well today. iPad abandoned five years ago, maybe more. Even putting Linux on it like some recent posts mention is not worth it. Raspberry PI 4 has a lot more memory and oomph.