I would choose the iPad Air 2. My wife is a musician who's iPad 2 has seen better days (with our two year old cracking the screen, among other things). She is practically glued to her piano, and reading chord charts has become more difficult than ever. If I were to win, I'd give this to her for...
Go for the jailbreak. There is a fix for the SSL issue available in Cydia called SSLPatch in BigBoss repo. No need to be unsecured because you didn't update the OS.
Seriously digging this theme. It adds a level of warmth back to the OS that disappeared when we went all flat and cloudy. Definitely worth the few bucks to own.
No issues as of yet. Have to restore and get my phone replaced today as my wifi took a dump, but it was bad prior to jailbreaking. Love being able to get rid of the nasty, blurry, dock.
I had a lot of issues with my MacBook when I updated to Mavericks. A clean install took care of it though. I'm a little surprised your experience didn't improve. You might want to run some hard drive diagnostics. How much RAM do you have?
Someone else can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the Sprint version will only support international sims. I understand the Verizon model will work with US carrier sims, but you do not get LTE functionality.
Absolutely legit reasons. I understand there will always be a reason for some users to jailbreak. For me, the features I wanted ended up native, so I didn't need it anymore. Hopefully Apple will catch on to some of the other reasons people do it, and turn those into native features as well.
Which model/software is it running? I had a lot of issues with my iPad 1 running the newest iOS version available for it. They ended up having to replace or due to a bad wifi chip.
My favorite has been and remains the unibody MacBook Pro. It's such a classy looking machine, while maintaining a certain level of utilitarianism. Second favorite would have been the colored clamshell notebook that came out around the time of the original iMac.