Our Favorite Tablets & Accessories

Screen time in our house is a negotiation, and the device in the middle of it matters. A rainy afternoon with six kids indoors can hinge on whether one tablet can carry a drawing app, a read-along book, and a show for the little ones without falling apart by dinner. Whatever we buy has to survive being passed from hand to sticky hand.

The Apple iPad is the one that has held up to all of it. It is durable enough to weather being handed between the middle kids and dropped onto more than one couch, and family sharing lets us keep the little ones’ content separate from what our oldest is doing for school. It is quick, the screen is easy on young eyes, and it does everything from homework to quiet-time cartoons on a single charge.

Weighed against the cheaper tablets we considered, the iPad won on the long game. A budget tablet or two we looked at were tempting on price but felt slow and disposable, the kind of thing that would be in a drawer by next year. The iPad keeps getting updates, holds its value if we ever pass it down or resell it, and slots neatly into the Apple devices the rest of the family already uses. For a household that will get years of hard use out of one screen, it was the buy that actually lasts.