How much is a tablet? Today’s prices

Start with the brand, not the spec sheet

The brand table below is the answer most people need. Amazon prices its Fire tablets low and earns on what is bought through them — Jeff Bezos said in 2012 that Amazon sells its devices at about break-even. Apple prices the iPad as a premium product. Samsung sells across the whole range under one name, which is why its middle price says less than its spread.

With Samsung the letter is the price: a Galaxy Tab A is the budget line and a Galaxy Tab S the premium one, and at the same screen size the two can sit hundreds of dollars apart. Check which series a listing is before comparing its price with anything.

Amazon files e-readers such as the Kindle and Kobo under tablets, and the figures on this page leave them out: an e-reader does one thing, reading, and is priced as a different purchase. For reading alone it is the cheaper tool, and the Kindle and Kobo pages price every model we track.

Storage is where the same model gets dearer

Most tablets are sold in several storage sizes, and the step up is often a large share of the base price. Whether it is worth paying turns on one thing the listing may not lead with: a card slot. Fire tablets and most Android tablets take a microSD card, so an inexpensive card does the job of the dearer configuration. An iPad has no card slot, so the storage you buy is the storage you keep.

Cellular models are separate listings at a higher price than the Wi-Fi version of the same tablet. Check which of the two a price belongs to before setting it against another.

Screen size

Tablets bunch around 10, 11 and 13 inches, and the size table below prices each class. Both it and the storage table mix brands, so part of any gap between two rows is which makers sell that size, not only the extra glass or memory. Where you can, compare two sizes of the same model: each product page here lists the model’s other sizes beside it.