Anecdotal: my iPads have never aged the way my iPhones do. As to the reasons, I suspect the primary is just where and how it's used: I beat the piss out of my iphones, dropping them, using them out of good areas, on the go, in the car, while eating, etc. where my iPads have a comparatively nice existence largely in my home. The most strenuous environment I use my tablets in is my porch.
But yeah, I just recently upgraded from an Air to the iPad Pro, mostly for the bigger screen and pencil. I had no reason to replace the current one other than having no reason to have two; 5 years on, it was kicking just as hard as ever.
My iPad Air has slown down to be almost unusable. It is ancient, and I’m guessing it’s the battery + software throttle going on, but it is still very reminiscent of an aging iPhone.
I’m not sure the throttling stuff really happens on the iPad. That was a check they added to the phones because of the unexpected shutdown issues, I don’t think that’s ever been much of a problem on the iPads because of their giant batteries.
However there is a known issue where for some reason iOS can start to get extremely slow. Restoring from backup or doing a fresh install sometimes makes a device WAY faster. Not unlike Windows back in the 95 days.
We solve reports of this when people were doing battery replacements. They go into Apple, get a new battery, and their phone wasn’t any faster. Then they’d do a fresh install and everything was fine. We also saw people give it a try before the battery replacement program was announced and have the same results.
Basically, the batteries and the only reason iOS can get insanely slow. There’s obviously some kind of rail bug that can destroy performance. But a fresh install fixes it.
Typically this happens if you run out of storage space. I don’t really know why but if you have less than about a gigabyte of free space everything becomes really slow.
But yeah, I just recently upgraded from an Air to the iPad Pro, mostly for the bigger screen and pencil. I had no reason to replace the current one other than having no reason to have two; 5 years on, it was kicking just as hard as ever.