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5 Reasons to Buy the iPad Air, 5 for the Retina iPad Mini and 5 to Buy Neither

Words to which you can append the letters “er”: light, thin, fast, cheap. Apple checked those boxes and more at its prosaically dubbed “Special Event“ Tuesday afternoon, trotting out retooled laptops, souped up tablets and a new hard-to-top price for OS X along with several key apps, as in “nada.” While the new iPads don’t cost nada, the starting price for an iPad is the cheapest it’s ever been — as little as $300 for a 16GB iPad Mini. An extra $100 fetches a new 16GB iPad Mini with a 7.9-inch Retina display and internal specs every bit the equal of the svelte new 9.7-inch A7-powered iPad Air. Time to buy one? Upgrade your existing model? Wait for better? Let’s talk tablets. Herewith, the arguments for the iPad Air: You don’t have an iPad, you’ve been thinking about buying an iPad and you want a hunka hunka burnin’ iPad. The iPad Air represents Apple’s best and brightest slate: a monster future-proof 64-bit processor, a beautiful 2048-by-1536 Retina display, an aluminum shell that’s 20% thinner than its predecessor with a 43% narrower bezel when held in portrait mode. It’s lost roughly 33% of the prior model’s weight, dropping1.4 pounds to just 1 pound, and it’s loaded with a slew of newly gratis productivity apps,Apple’s Pages to Numbers to Keynote — the entire iWork suite — as well as iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand. It’s more than a little better than the iPad 2. See that 16GB iPad 2 still inexplicably listed on the Apple Store for $400? Don’t buy it. I mean it — steer clear atcosts. Maybe Apple made too many and needs to burn through its overstock. Maybe the company’s nuts, who knows. If Apple’s now two-and-a-half year old second-gen iPad were $100, or $200 at most, there’d be an argument. But the differences here,size to weight and screen resolution to internal specs are stark — worth a lot more than the relatively trivial $100 delta Apple’sging for the 16GB iPad Air. $100 is