Apple once planned iPad with only 8 GB

In the meantime, Apple is said to have considered launching a very easily equipped tablet. The Youtuber Appledemoyt, which collects prototypes and other rarities from Apple history, has the hardware in a video Presented – and calls it “the worst iPad that Apple never released”. Technically, this is an iPad 2, i.e. the second generation of Apple tablets that the group launched on the market from March 2011. The special feature: Instead of the usual entry -level storage size of narrow 16 GB, Apple wanted to offer it with only 8 GB, i.e. halved in terms of storage technology. The idea was apparently to market a budget -friendly device, possibly for newcomers or schools – but you wouldn’t have had a lot of fun.

From the death year of Steve Jobs

From the beginning, Ipads always existed with 16 GB. Alternatively, you could also have 32 or 64 GB flash memory on the iPad 2. Internally, a 1 GHz faster double-core arm chip based on the Cortex-A9. This came from Samsung (not yet from TSMC) and was later referred to as A5. The SoC had access to 512 MByte DDR2-RAM. Steve Jobs in the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco took over the performance, even though he was already very bad at the time and he was actually on sick leave from Apple – he died in October of the same year.

According to Appledemoyt, the hardware he discovered is a prototype. An “8GB” label can be found on the back, which is finally confirmed when the hardware tests. At that time there was actually rumors for an 8 GB IPAD 2, among other things from the electronics sheet Digitimes from Taiwan. And it would not have been completely inappropriate, since in 2012 Iphones still existed with only 8 GB. However, if you wanted to shovel a lot of apps and lots of content – especially videos – on the hardware, you quickly get behind.

MacS memory now twice as large

Nowadays 128 GB are the minimum of iPhones and iPads. 256 GB for the Pro models of the iPhone 17 are now the rule. The RAM memory at Macs is now-and after years of user floating-at least 16 GB, i.e. twice as voluminous as the flash memory in prototype diad 2.

No normal iOS (later: iPados) runs on the 8 GB IPAD, but a test operating system. There is not much to do with it in practice, but the hardware is interesting.