iPad Price UK: Apple Hit the Cheap iPad Hardest

If you last shopped for a tablet a year ago, the iPad price UK buyers face today is going to sting. The cheapest new iPad Apple sells is £429. Ten weeks ago the same machine, same chip, same 128GB, was £329.

That is not a retailer marking things up. Apple raised its own prices across the iPad line on 25 June 2026, and it did not raise them evenly. Every figure below is what apple.com/uk was charging when I checked this morning.

Here is the whole ladder, what the increase actually did to it, and the one iPad I would not buy in September.

iPad price UK: what every model costs right now

Six configurations, six starting prices. These are the Wi-Fi models at base storage, taken from Apple's UK store:

• iPad, A16 chip, 11-inch, 128GB - £429
• iPad mini, A17 Pro chip, 8.3-inch, 128GB - £599
• iPad Air 11-inch, M4 chip, 128GB - £749
• iPad Air 13-inch, M4 chip, 128GB - £949
• iPad Pro 11-inch, M5 chip, 256GB - £1,199
• iPad Pro 13-inch, M5 chip, 256GB - £1,499

Two add-ons apply consistently across the range. Doubling the base storage costs £100, and adding cellular costs £150 flat, whichever size or storage tier you pick. Neither figure moves with the model, which makes them easy to budget for and easy to talk yourself into.

Note the storage line in that list, because it is the detail most comparison tables bury. The iPad Pro starts at 256GB while everything below it starts at 128GB. That matters when you get to the Air versus Pro decision further down.

The June increase hit the cheap iPads hardest

Apple lifted prices on 25 June across Macs, iPads, the Apple TV and the HomePod line. Tim Cook blamed memory and storage costs, calling the shortage a "hundred-year flood".

The headline number was reported in dollars, but the UK rises landed the same week. Here is the before and after in pounds:

• iPad: £329 to £429, up £100
• iPad mini: £499 to £599, up £100
• iPad Air 11-inch: £599 to £749, up £150
• iPad Air 13-inch: £799 to £949, up £150
• iPad Pro 11-inch: £999 to £1,199, up £200
• iPad Pro 13-inch: £1,299 to £1,499, up £200

Read that as cash and the Pro looks worst off, because £200 is more than £100. Read it as a percentage and it inverts completely. These are my own calculations from the figures above:

• iPad: up 30.4 per cent
• iPad Air 11-inch: up 25.0 per cent
• iPad mini and iPad Pro 11-inch: up 20.0 per cent
• iPad Air 13-inch: up 18.8 per cent
• iPad Pro 13-inch: up 15.4 per cent

The cheapest iPad in the range took the steepest increase and the most expensive took the shallowest, almost exactly twice over. Whatever the memory-cost explanation, the effect on a UK buyer is regressive: the person spending the least absorbed the biggest proportional hit.

It also shifted the entry point of the whole category. A £329 iPad was an impulse buy for a lot of households. A £429 one is a considered purchase, and at that price it starts getting compared with laptops rather than with other tablets. I wrote about the wider Mac and iPad increase when it landed.

Do not buy an iPad mini this month

This is the clearest buy-or-wait call in the range, and none of the retail pages that dominate this search will tell you about it.

The iPad mini currently on sale is the mini 7, running the A17 Pro chip, and it has not been touched since 2024. A replacement is expected in September 2026, which is this month. The reported changes are not cosmetic: an OLED display in place of the current LCD, the A20 Pro chip from the iPhone 18 Pro, better water resistance and a new vibration-based speaker system.

That is reporting, not an Apple announcement, so treat the timing as a strong rumour rather than a date in the diary. But the direction of travel is not in doubt, and £599 for a two-year-old model weeks before its successor is the worst-timed £599 in Apple's UK store.

If you need a small iPad this week, buy a refurbished mini 7 and accept the compromise. If you can wait a month, wait a month.

The iPad Air at £749 is the one that still makes sense

The Air is the opposite case. Apple refreshed it in March 2026 with the M4 chip, and there is no further update expected this year. Whatever you pay today, you are buying current hardware with a full run ahead of it.

At £749 for the 11-inch it sits £320 above the base iPad and £450 below the 11-inch Pro. That £320 buys the M4 in place of the A16, a laminated display and a machine that will still be getting software updates comfortably after the A16 model stops being interesting.

Air 13-inch or Pro 11-inch? The gap is smaller than it looks

This is where the £949 and £1,199 figures cause trouble, because they are not like-for-like. The Air starts at 128GB and the Pro starts at 256GB.

Match them up and the sums change. A 13-inch Air at 256GB is £1,049, which puts it £150 below the 11-inch Pro rather than £250. My arithmetic, using Apple's own £100 storage step. So the real question is not whether the Pro is worth £250 more, it is whether the M5 chip and the Pro display are worth £150 and a two-inch drop in screen size.

For most people the answer is the bigger screen. For anyone editing video or running heavy apps for hours, it is the Pro. What it is not is a £250 decision, which is how the sticker prices present it.

Three ways to pay less than the sticker price

The £429 figure is the list price, not the floor. There are three routes below it that are open to more people than usually realise.

Education pricing is the first. Apple's UK education store currently lists the iPad from £409, the mini from £549, the Air from £699 and the Pro from £1,099. That is £20, £50, £50 and £100 off respectively - between 4.7 and 8.3 per cent by my calculation, which is a good deal less than the ten per cent most people assume. I went through who actually qualifies and what the real saving looks like yesterday.

The gift card promotion is the second, and it is worth more than the discount itself. Apple is giving a gift card of £80 to £120 with an eligible Mac or iPad bought with education savings, running from 13 August to 22 October 2026. Stack it on an Air at £699 and the effective cost drops below the pre-June retail price of £599 in value terms, if you have something to spend the card on.

Apple's refurbished store is the third, and it is the one most people skip because the word "refurbished" does the wrong work. These come with a new battery, a new outer shell and the same one-year warranty as new stock. On a line-up where the entry model just went up thirty per cent, that is the most sensible £429 you can avoid spending.

One more thing worth checking before you buy: an iPad is covered by AppleCare One, which changes the maths if you already own a couple of Apple devices.

iPad price UK: common questions

Why did iPad prices go up in the UK in 2026?

Apple raised prices across most of its hardware on 25 June 2026 and pointed at memory and storage chip costs. It was a global change rather than anything UK-specific, and it came with no hardware update - the same iPad you could buy on 24 June cost £100 more on 26 June.

What is the cheapest iPad in the UK?

New, it is the 11-inch iPad with the A16 chip at £429, or £409 with education pricing. Apple's refurbished store and last-generation stock at Currys, John Lewis and Argos regularly go lower, and a refurbished unit carries the same one-year warranty as a new one.

Will iPad prices come back down?

Nothing suggests they will. Apple has not reversed a price increase of this kind before, and the chip-cost pressure Tim Cook described has not eased. The realistic expectation is that £429 becomes the new floor and the next model launches at or above it.

My take

If you want an iPad Air, buy it. It is current, it is not due a refresh, and waiting costs you months of use for no benefit.

If you want an iPad mini, wait. A successor is expected within weeks and it is a real upgrade rather than a spec bump.

And if £429 for the base model feels like too much for what it is, that instinct is right. It rose 30 per cent in a single day for no extra hardware, which is more than any other iPad in the range. Buy it refurbished, buy it with education pricing, or buy the Air and keep it twice as long.

Source: Apple Just Increased Prices on MacBooks, iPads, and More, MacRumors