So Iām not defending this per se. OTOH, obviously Apple has to cut specs/features compared to the Air for example, so this seems to be one place.
Given the market this is aimed at, I think itās only something people like our forum care about, and by the same token any of us here that would care/extensively use the USB speeds is likely looking at a Pro or Air anyway.
TLDR. you have to cut things to hit a price point, and ALL of the OEMS do this in their product lines. Lenovoās Yoga being one of the best examples where as you traverse the product line from the 9i down to the 5, specs and features fall off or are lower.
Related to the above. I canāt speak to Appleās supply chain, but in ours, USB2 chips are less than half the cost of USB3. And when your are talking about literally millions of devices, that will add up. And yes Iām aware that the new iPad has a significant price bump.
But at some point, for a company whose NET profits for the twelve months ending June 30, 2022 were $99.63 BILLION, you reach a point of diminishing returns. As an accounting major, I sat through the exceedingly boring marketing classes that stressed McDonaldās should only give out ONE napkin per meal and save hundreds of thousands, and now you have to ASK for napkins at most McDonald. Even if USB2 parts are 1/2 the cost of USB3, does that really warrant the downgrade when you are also enticing buyers to use this device in a productivity mode with a keyboard folio that I still think is far superior to the Magic Keyboard for the big boy toys?
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Yes, but you also get to be one of, if not the most profitable tech companies, by using every tool at your disposal. They are after all a for profit enterprise that has responsibilities to their shareholders as well as their customers.
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Iām a good little capitalist in my own narrow field, but sometimes you have to deliver better quality for quality sakeā¦
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Donāt disagree, but Iād bet money that Apple made the calculation that the vast majority of iPad buyers arenāt concerned about USB speeds and for those that do, they have mutiple models to fill that niche.
Plus the one thing that iPad buyers likely actually cared about related to USB, apple gave them by switching to USBC
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I will have to disagree emphatically on that one. In this day and age, we have single board computers (e.g. Rock Pi) for as little as $25 that have USB 3.0 support, not to mention sub-$100 tablets which have supported USB 3.0 for many years now. There are many other things Apple could have cut out of the iPad to limit BOM costs, but I will call this one how it is: it was a fumble.
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Yeah, but you mess with hobbyists and tinkerers at your own risk. And they will notice.
The average iPad base level buyer (or even the Air and Pros tbh in many cases) wonāt and donāt care until maybe they feel itās too slow and maybe look up why.
Still greedy and silly, but hey, as @Desertlap said, you donāt get that rich (that youāre one of the few companies to not lose value while almost everyone else is) by being generous and kind.
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And the hits just keep coming! 
I had not fully realized that they changed the pogo pin layout/location, at least thatās what I read somewhere. So despite the case being almost identical to the iPad Pro and recent iPad Air case, their keyboards are not compatible.
Another fun realization is that base iPad owners now have to travel with that easily lost lightning-to-USB-C adapter, because while the Apple Pencil 1 lasts a long time, once itās out of charge youāre going to need it. Thatās also going to be great when using these at schools.
Side note, does the pencil charge from an iPhone? Thatād be pretty funny, using your phone as a pencil battery. 
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FWIW the overall case dimension are very slightly bigger/wider than the Air or Pro 11, enough so that tightly fitted cases such as apples own, donāt fit. Plus of course the pogo pins are new.
That being said, a lot of 3rd party cases such as most of the Spec stuff fit, though you do have to watch in some cases (pun intended) of partially blocking the front camera
So for example, in one area compared to the Air, itās slightly wider when held in portrait orientation, for the obvious reason of accommodating horizontal camera.
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Yes it does, though youāll get an error message when you plug it in to the iPhone
As ridiculous as that looks, itās a bit of a saving grace for the base iPad. Few people will consistently bring their adapter along, but many users will have their iPhone on them.
Of course the relative convenience stops when Apple updates the iPhone to USB-C. Thanks EU!! :vb-grin:
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My feeling is the adapter will get lost when it goes looking for the missing Pencil capā¦
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The K-12 school I taught in recently was 1:1 iPads for all grades. They had those logitech all in one case/keyboards on all of them. There were zero apple pencils or other stylii in the building.
In my much smaller scale experience using iPads in a school of 3, we used the logitech crayons because they were half the price. They have a female port and got plugged in to the same cable the iPad was charging with whenever the iPads were off the charger. I would never in a million years trust a kid with a popsicle stick charging pencil.
But schools general use lockable carts for younger grades and only pull tablets out as a class as needed, so those would have one USB-C running to each dock station to charge with the new ones. If they used logitech crayons, theyād have to have a separate charging dock set up with lightning cables. I canāt imagine many school set ups will bother with pencils of any variety.
As much as I love using digital PDF curriculums with my kids, schools canāt or wonāt implement a similar set up at scale. I think some of it has to do with automated grading through google classroom if the kids are selecting multiple choice or doing short answers typed in. Some of it probably has to do with teachers who just donāt want to learn yet another new system in their already overbooked PD or planning time. 4th graders were fluent in building power point presentations on their iPads. The expectation for handwritten anything has dropped dramatically. Everything is expected to be typed, from shockingly young.
Side story: My oldest is now set up with Hoopla to get library books to his tablet and has gone through 4 books in a series in the first day he was set up with it. I had to order the other two on Amazon since they arenāt out as ebooks yet. He complained about how two day shipping takes soooooo loooooong. I went on a good āwhen I was your ageā rant.
Thereās so much potential to digitize so much of the paper clutter of schools, but the tools still arenāt mainstream yet.
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