Welcome on board guys!
In my opinion and last months experience I think the iPad 2 is the best retro iPad ever. The first one is special because of the first Apple tablet but the iPad 2 is powerful, easier and looks gorgeus. Can run wide variates of games and they run really nice.
iPad 1 is always in my heart like the first iPhone but they are not the best retro machines for iOS gaming experience.
Thanks for the warm welcome!
That may be true, but I got this iPad 1 for free a week ago and it'd be a shame not to use it while it still works. I can't be too bothered with ponying up the money for an iPad 2 right now as I also own an iPad (2018) and a Tab S5e. Maybe later, who knows?
What do you mean by easier? Easier to jailbreak? Because I've found this particular tablet to be very easy too in that regard, although I must say I do have lots of experience with Unix-based operating systems and there's not much that I think is hard anymore.
The Checkra1n jailbreak, back when it only ran on macOS, was much harder than this IMO. It had you configure QEMU within Linux to use IOMMU, which enabled macOS to access your USB hardware directly from within a virtual machine. You also needed a relatively recent processor for that as it had to support VT-d.
However, if you mean easier to find apps for, yes that's true. Like I said, finding the right versions of IPA files is getting increasingly difficult and it's the reason why archiving these is so important.
Oh yeah, my iPad (at least) can hold all of my old applications. Using it as a retro entertainment machine as you said is pretty good, and adding things like netflix and maybe, if i manage to make it work, amazon prime video makes it a perfect media station, giving the fact that netflix runs as smooth as on my pc. What a shame though, i gotta say that my ipad intrigues me for being this open compared to modern iDevices. I consider myself lucky for finding this website, it has everything that I need. Fortunately, i have some "good" premium games of the time, my dad bought some of them lol. If you want, i can share them with you