I have a 7” tablet for fun and reading ebooks but since internet surfing is my main computer use how many tabs can an ipad open? My guess is 15 at most.
So a 12” ipad is out for me
I usually have 70 tabs/sites open (8gb DDR3 memory) because some are retained for a long time as bookmarked sites I need to return to in detail even a few weeks later. I don’t know why but keeping many many tabs open works better with an SSD than my old spinning disks.
I’ve had an iPad up to 50 tabs before I got bored and quit.
As for your 8gb machine with 70 tabs open and why it works better with an SSD - that’s because your tabs are causing the machine to exceed the physical RAM available to it and it is using storage space for virtual memory. Unfortunately, this will kill SSDs in short order because they have a finite number of read/write cycles available to them. You should upgrade RAM if possible ASAP or consider reducing open tabs/sending pages of interest to your reading list.