The iPad would go from a never-buy to a buy-right-away for me, if they added user profiles. It'd be a nice thing to have on your coffee table, where anyone in the household can pick it up and be logged into all of their stuff.
Windows XP had this feature. Chromebooks have this feature. It's inexcusable that such an expensive gadget can only have one user.
Tim Cook's fear of people not buying a full set of Apple devices for each person is the driving force behind not just the lack of multiuser support, but also the overall nerfing of iPadOS.
For the past 5+ years it's been, "This will be the year of real work on the iPad," but they keep circling around it, trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook.
The flip side here is if I could use an iPad to replace the MacMini on my desk and connect to a monitor with the same support my Mac does I'd most likely have a top end iPad Pro as opposed to my mildly spec'd MacMini M2 and iPad Air M1. I'd literally spend MORE money on that 1 iPad than both existing iPad and Macs I have today.
Same. Plus with multi-user, I would own multiple size iPads since they instantly become more useful as shared family devices, rather than only being tied to one persons iCloud/messages/email. And more importantly for our old boy Tim - they would be larger storage sizes because they would be logged into multiple users.
Perhaps someone who's more versed in Apple tech can weigh in, but my limited understanding is that tvOS' users are mostly an illusion - the current user is just a flag exposed to running apps, and each app decides on its own what (if anything) they do with that information. There's no system-level separation of data or permissions for different users.
(In my experience, most non-Apple apps just seem to ignore user profiles on the Apple TV, and either behave as single-user apps, or have their own totally unrelated user profiles.)
Yeah, I think that's a assumption Apple made that most AppleTV devices would be in the same household where people can simply use the streaming app's ability to switch profiles. That sucks if you have roommates that pay for their own streaming subscriptions or the AppleTV device is in a common area such a dormitory. I suppose they could solve this by allowing ad-hoc profiles if AppleTV and user's IOS device is on the same network.
The user profile stuff as far as I can tell literally just determines the recently watched data in the Apple TV app. It doesn't even use your iCloud account when you select your account - I attempted to show some photos from my photo library on an Apple TV set up by someone else the other day and it just wanted to pop up their photos instead.
You must be a school or business with DUNS number and rigorous, manual verification through Apple to set up shared iPads with managed Apple IDs in the School or Business Manager Portal.
Yes, but you see it's even more profitable if apple can convince you to buy both. They can't allow you to not buy both because that will make shareholders sad
I mean we can always wish but I think Thi’s has been the major gripe for a number of years. They could run macOS today in an iPad. Alternatively they could at the very least copy some of the basic workflows in iOS but it’s just different enough that even with a keyboard the iPad feels off compared to a Mac.
> trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook.
TBH, if you buy an iPad and their nice keyboard case, it costs almost as much as an MBA. This is one of the reasons I simply cannot justify getting a new iPad these days. The other is that my 8 year old iPad Pro still works just fine, in case I ever need to do iPad-ish things like draw with the pencil.
$270-$300 (used to be $350?) for the iPad keyboard. I feel like Apple did a good job targeting a user segment that is just happy to spend extra money on gadgets, aside from whoever really needs this laptop-tablet in-between.
Yeah I feel lucky to have picked one up for $199 back in the day. Still use it, though TBH it's mostly as a second monitor for my MBA, when I'm traveling. I don't work on the iPad itself that much, even though the keyboard is delightful.
> TBH, if you buy an iPad and their nice keyboard case, it costs almost as much as an MBA.
Right. Which, by my calculations, means it costs half as much as an MBA plus an iPad and their nice keyboard case.
Don't know how much either the iPad or the nice keyboard case cost by themselves, but probably more than 0. So even skipping the nice keyboard case and buying just a naked iPad in addition to the MBA still makes Apple more money.
Why would they forgo this if they're indeed the mustache-twirling capitalists like everyone says?
> they keep circling around it, trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook.
Which is really silly, because if someone needs to do actual work they are not going to do it on an iPad no matter how capable it is. The form factor simply does not work for getting work done. Apple has nothing to fear here.
>Which is really silly, because if someone needs to do actual work they are not going to do it on an iPad no matter how capable it is. The form factor simply does not work for getting work done.*
Nonsens. The iPad is basically a 11 to 13 (Pro) monitor+computer with an amazing touch screen. Adding the official keyboard folio, or any bluetooth keyboard/mourse is trivial, and it makes for an excellent on-the-go machine. Not different to the 12-inch MacBook (circa 2015) and the older fan favorite 12-inch PowerBook G4 (circa 2003), and I know several devs who swore by them. Linus used and loved one of the latter (with PPC Linux on in his case).
The only issue is the lack of OS level support for some stuff, not the form factor.
Admins, devs working mostly on the Cloud, photographers, and writers already use it for "getting work done", I've seen execs too.
My monitor has a powered USB-C port and USB hub built into it. It's one cable to dock a laptop, it's pretty cool.
If I could plug my iPad into that cable to use it as a Mac I would do that all the time and buy a more powerful iPad. It would be an iPad for idle browsing and a Mac for the times I need a real computer.
You almost can. With Stage Manager enabled, an iPad plugged into a Studio Display is shockingly Mac-like. You get a menubar, windows that resize, a mouse pointer, etc. I could easily convince someone that they were on a Mac if I hid the iPad.
I don't like Stage Manager at all in undocked mode, though. I wish it would just turn on when the iPad was docked, and turn off otherwise.
the form factor is a problem. Have you ACTUALLY tried using an ipad as a laptop for more than a few minutes? It is top-heavy and falls over all the time. Even if you solve that problem, you now have multiple devices that you must keep charged and with you at all time.
That form factor exists on the windows side for about a decade now, so yes people do actually use it day to day for their work.
It's easy to forget that many laptops are used 99% plugged to a hub and an external monitor. I have a keyboard and mouse I like a lot, and having a tablet floating on an arm next to my other screen instead of half open clam with a useless keyboard pointing at me is incredibly freeing.
Even on the go, bringing a bluetooth (trackpoint II）keyboard is just better overall IMHO. It's up to people's taste, but tablet form factors are not some unsolved mistery. Commercial success would of course be another discussion.
Tablets will need to become a great deal lighter than they currently are before the awkwardness you describe will dissipate. Maybe after some kind of breakthrough in battery tech that allows for a much lighter and thinner battery?
Until then, I would agree that the old 12" MacBook still has a big leg up over an iPad + keyboard due to its clamshell form factor. It's so much less fussy for any use case where a keyboard matters.
I have a kickstand case with a magnetic Bluetooth keyboard and integrated 3rd party pen holder and it works just like a laptop but supports the pen, plus I can leave the keyboard behind and prop it on my treadmill to watch movies, etc. It's actually a lot more convenient than a laptop in a lot of circumstances.
You know you can use a standard Bluetooth and keyboard and mouse with an iPad? My wife uses her 13 inch iPad for everything - mostly Zoom, Office, everything web based, and “consumption”. I have an M2 MacBook Air that I bought in 2023 for a side project I was doing when I was in between jobs. I haven’t opened it since. I do the little bit of stuff I do outside of work on my iPad Air 3.
I've just never understood this. A 13" MacBook Air would accomplish everything better for me. A laptop has a stand for the screen built into it and it's much more stable on any surface vs a tablet case + stand.
Sure, it's easier to use a tablet while standing, but that's what I use my phone for, and it's always with me in my pocket. If I'm going to carry a 13" tablet around it might as well be a laptop which is thinner and lighter than a tablet + keyboard case.
Then there is always something annoying that I can't do on an iPad so I have to grab a real computer to do it.
I tried using iPads many times over the years but ended up selling them because a laptop + smartphone does everything I need better.
You stated "You know you can use a standard Bluetooth and keyboard and mouse with an iPad? My wife uses her 13 inch iPad for everything - mostly Zoom, Office, everything web based"
In my opinion all of that works better on a laptop. I don't use any streaming services so that functionality is not important for me, but I do recognize that may be important for some.
For me carrying a tablet + laptop while traveling would just be wasted space when I can and prefer to do everything on the laptop anyways.
My wife spends a lot more time in consumption mode and rarely uses it as a “productivity device”
And you can’t download movies from streaming services on a laptop and I have unlimited cellular data on our laptops for $25 a month. When I say we travel a lot - I mean we were on a plane going somewhere over a dozen times last year and this year we are spending a month and half doing the digital nomad thing in another country right now and we will be doing one way trips across 4 cities for two months this summer.
Yeah but the cheapest iPad only costs $300. Not all of us can afford a MacBook Air. Not to mention I found a case which has a kickstand feature + magnetic BT keyboard + pen to make it work like a laptop + added pen functionality ($60 for all of those 3rd party accessories).
So you don’t understand why someone who doesn’t need a computer most of the time might rather have an iPad?
Besides, you can’t get a MacBook with cellular and you can’t download movies to use offline with most streaming services on a Mac since most of them don’t have Mac apps.
We travel a lot. Even I take my laptop + iPad + external USB powered/USB video display that works with one USB cable. Most of the time I just use my external display. But I can use my iPad as a third display.
I really use my personal laptop for nothing. I left it at home while we are spending a month and a half in another country. When I get off work, I don’t think about using my computer for anything - I don’t do side projects and haven’t for 30 years.
Cue my old manager SSH’ing into work machines while on his boat from his iPad - it does happen. Not saying that working on it is the norm by any means, but it’s about on par with “my android phone is logged in to my tmux session on the dev server and I’m cowboy coding from the bar”
I haven't seen one yet, but theoretically a case that secures the tablet in a holder that has a proper hinge (instead of the typical kickstand style) attached would work. You'd have to weight the keyboard a bit but there's no reason it wouldn't work, and effectively give you the exact same form factor as a laptop.
i bought a magic keyboard for my 11" ipad pro and ultimately didn't use it much. it does have a traditional laptop-style hinge, but the way the ipad mounts to the case brings it forward over the keyboard more than with a regular laptop. the hinge also doesn't allow for a very wide range of motion (even compared to macbooks). finally, the center of gravity is really high compared to a laptop which makes it awkward to use as a literal laptop or when lying down.
it definitely looks cool (i could see the design having been inspired by the OG Mac and 20th Anniversary Mac) but works best on a stable surface; plus if you want to use it purely as a tablet, you're left with a big clunky keyboard case to deal with.
the idea of a laptop/tablet combo is cool but i haven't seen the concept executed very successfully from either starting point.
the point of that hinge, besides weight distribution, is to make it easy to reach and touch the bottom of the screen, and so that it's not fully perpendicular to your finger.
and that particular subproblem of using a tablet as a notebook - it solves it well! but it's still a little weird when you try to use it like a laptop. maybe this is a cop-out but it definitely feels like a product that would not have passed the Jobs test in its current form.
You would be correct. If the ipad let you use full osx it would be pretty attractive to me and I probably would have spent the 5 minutes needed to discover the magic keyboard, but unfortunately the idea of buying a computing device with such insanely powerful hardware but being locked into standard tablet UX really doesn't excite me.
I would absolutely carry an iPad Pro with a dev environment with me on the holidays for emergencies instead of macbook. And I could add a cheap keyboard, mouse, and connect it to TV to get good enough work environment.
Or connect it to dock at home, just like I do with the macbook.
Any time I think about doing this, I remind myself of the news story[0] about the iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard being heavier than a MacBook Air. I believe it was thicker as well.
I’m not sure if it’s still the case, as they trimmed down the iPad Pro quite a bit, but I don’t think the iPad is that much of a boon for travel. For the size and weight, it seems moot. I’d rather have the keyboard and trackpad of a proper MacBook, full macOS, and a system that won’t fall apart. The last time I took an iPad on a plane, the person in front of me reclined, hit the iPad, and it flew off the magnetic keyboard and I had to fish around for it on the floor. Thankfully it didn’t break.
But why? A 13" MacBook Air is smaller and lighter than carrying a tablet + keyboard + mouse. And iOS is always going to be more difficult to do real work on vs MacOS.
> But why? A 13" MacBook Air is smaller and lighter than carrying a tablet + keyboard + mouse.
Because portability isn’t just about weight?
There are plenty of situations where a tablet for many will be more usable than a laptop. Cramped spaces, on a plane, laying back on a couch, standing, quick pull-outs in public, or maybe when they want something that feels more personal rather than “I’m working now.” That last one is a big one. A LOT of IT people I know have moved to tablets for their personal machines because they want to be as far away as possible from anything their brain can connect to work.
Given OP specifically said “for emergencies” and “good enough,” that suggests to me they are looking for flexibility, not maximum capability, largely an area in which the modern tablet for a not insignificant number of people, excels.
> And iOS is always going to be more difficult to do real work on vs MacOS.
If your workflow depends on native macOS software, then sure, maybe. But for people whose work is browser based, cloud based, or remote (SSH, RDP, SaaS tools), iOS is perfectly viable. I know people running entire businesses from iPads and its not just viable, they prefer it, they don't even own computing devices outside of iOS/Android.
Personally, I don’t use an iPad for work, but realistically, I could. SSH exists, and most of what I use lives in a browser anyway.
Why? My wife and travel a lot and we spend extended periods of time away from home. I can’t imagine wanting to work from just an iPad. My travel and home setup is a Roost laptop stand, an Apple BT keyboard and mouse and a portable USB C monitor with a stand
My dad and my brother use ipad pros for their healthcare business and rarely use laptops. For them, the year of real work happened several years ago. My brother even has a mouse for it somehow.
Yeah they should even just let you install macOS if you want, they’d probably sell a lot of overpriced storage at a minimum and people still wouldn’t use them for real work…
That’s their goal (or it used to be). When the iPad was first released the idea was that the iPad would be all 80% of people needed.
The metaphor of cars vs trucks was used. For heavy duty work, trucks (Macs) will always be around. For everyone else, a car (iPad) will do just fine.
When the iPad nano was released they killed off the best selling iPad, the mini. Their statement on this was that they want to be the one to cannibalize their own products. If they don’t do it someone else will. Look at the iPhone, it made the iPod obsolete. Had they missed the boat on smartphones like Microsoft, they’d be screwed, as the iPod was half the business. Instead, they make way more on iPhones than they ever did on iPods. iPhone replaced the iPod sales and then some.
Yes. I want to blame auto-correct, but “o” and “a” are so far apart that I’m just not sure. Of course I’ve had modern iOS autocorrect do much worse, because it does what it thinks instead of what I type.
And especially more silly, since they'll soon launch a cheap A-series chipped MacBook. Why can I have multiple users on a $700 MacBook, but not a $1500 iPad Pro?
> Which is really silly, because if someone needs to do actual work they are not going to do it on an iPad no matter how capable it is. The form factor simply does not work for getting work done.
I know plenty of people who in fact have moved to an iPad as a primary computing device, including for work/business. Including a handful of engineering leaders using remote-code solutions.
Bean Counter Tim is going to drive Apple into the ground before he does anything useful. Just look at the current state of the ecosystem when it comes to UI/UX and software stability.
I mainly use my iPad Pro like a MacBook with the Magic Keyboard and a Razer mouse (I can even play ARC Raiders perfectly on it, streamed from the gaming pc in another room; having a completely silent gaming setup in the living room is amazing) connected.
My macOS muscle memory works most of the time, but there are also quite some details which are slightly different or missing. If they would allow a macOS “mode” on iPad I would choose it over a MacBook instantly for work.
I’ve been experimenting with a 13” iPad Pro and Mac mini, setup with Tailscale. I love it, minus the general issues you run into with Remote Desktop. That plus not being able to deploy apps unless I’m on the same wifi (as an iOS developer.)
A dual boot iPad would be killer. I would go out and by the maxed out M5 if it was possible. MacOS for workdays, and iPadOS for everything else. That or just finish the last mile of iPadOS (Add terminal access, long running processes, lower level file system access, actual developer tooling.)
Remote Desktop is another nerfed thing. Windows is sending around window positions and UI primitives, while Mac still streams terribly compressed and lagging video of desktop, unable to even adapt resolution to client.
Fwiw, Modern Windows is mostly DWM, and doesn't get the benefit of using GDI primatives for any serious work, so it's also "just" sending compressed video streams. These days it's basically all H.264/5 thanks to GPUs taking over.
I’m using the iPad Magic Keyboard which is also a stand. So it’s pretty much the same as using a MacBook. I do have the 13 inch. I tried the 11 inch but personally I found that too small to use comfortably like this.
I bought M1 pro ipad that ended up being on a windowsill in kitchen as a youtube tv or a again a youtube viewport while rowing, lol. What a waste, but I cannot find a better use for it. User interface also sucks, half the time i have to ask chatgpt to extricate me from some accidental split screen or what not. Kicker is that it needs to be charged almost daily while it is really only used about 30-45 min a day in the morning while my kids m4 air can go for a week.
To be fair, back when it was released it did do that. I didn’t use my iPad often in 2010, but it held onto its charge extremely well. Almost no loss while sitting idle.
I think all the push notification, cloud syncing, and everything else in the background are what kill it now.
As someone who very occasionally used my iPad, I think this may be the root cause of why I gave up on it and no longer own one. I didn’t use it a lot, so the battery was always dead when I went to pick it up. This wasn’t a problem with the first gen.
I’ve accepted that I need to charge my phone daily. I will not charge something like an iPad or laptop daily. If I’m not using it on battery for 8+ hours per day, there should be no reason it can’t hold a charge. There should be a proper sleep mode, instead of just turning off the display like on a phone. I always find it awkward and frustrating when an iPad is getting a bunch of notifications, waking up the screen, every few minutes while no one is even near it and those notifications are also going to the person’s phone.
I feel the same way about the Apple Pencil. I would have used it more if they used Wacom-style tech that didn’t require the stylus be charged. Then it could simply be picked up and used… like a pencil. I don’t know what the Apple Pencil’s excuse is for not being able to hold a charge.
They spend plenty of time adding "pro" features and apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, which they wouldn't do unless they wanted people to use them.
I'm willing to bet it's as simple as that no Apple SWEs or anyone who has to edit video or sound uses an ipad for work. As soon as Apple forced some to use one, they'd fix all of the UI problems that make them a nightmare.
Yeah, everyone I know who owns an iPad for personal use, they also own a laptop. It's possible they use the iPad more than the laptop, but they still need the laptop, which might be a Mac.
I could excuse it if the iPad was a $200 novelty like the Amazon Fire tablets, but they're putting M-series chips in them and marketing (and pricing) them like PC replacements.
I just picked up a new iPad with A16 chip for roughly $300 - sure they aren't M-series level but it's plenty fast for all of my day-to-day tasks, with good battery life and 3rd party keyboard/case/pen for another $60 and it functions like a laptop when I need a laptop.
> Yes, you can use a Mac laptop with your phone acting as a hotspot but unless you have unlimited data, that gets expensive real fast.
And why exactly is that different from having the cellular connection on iPad? You can have the exact same data plan on your phone that you use as hotspot.
I'm not really in this boat (don't have an ipad, no use for it) but if I did, it would actually cost me more to have a SIM in it than just share the internet from my phone. Having a second SIM for my plan would cost me 2€ / moth extra, with no other benefit: internet usage by that 2nd SIM would be deducted from my plan, which would remain otherwise the same.
I think some (most?) carriers in the US charge for hotspot traffic separately from direct access from the phone (by looking at packet's TTL, it's lower by 1)
Working as intended. Even the way you framed it. Every family member has a separate physically distinct iPad, paid for separately. It's never considered that two people might be able to use the same hardware, which is the question here.
> Hard to share the things people use at the same time.
Yes, but if it's your goal to have fewer cars, then you'd make an effort not to need to use it at the same time. If that's not what you're trying to do, fine. My wife and I share a car. It's slightly inconvenient sometimes, but really not bad at all. For our particular life anyway.
So here we're talking about iPads. Some families need multiple devices for various reasons. Some don't except for the fact that iPads don't support accounts. No one's saying you would have to use them. But you're not allowed to.
1 car for our family of four seems to work fine for us in the city. Hard to imagine people with different living situations.
I held off a while on giving my youngest child his own iPad because he and his brother were playing nicely together on one more often than not. It turned iPad time into social play-together time.
What's the point here? Then you'll need another car?
Remember, we're comparing to iPads. Apple intentionally hobbles them to induce demand for multiple iPads. This isn't a question of being allowed to own multiple iPads/cars. It's a question of being artificially prevented from owning a single one.
The point isn't that you have to commit to being a single-car household for life. It's that at some points in time, you can be.
I’m 51 and I can’t remember ever going to a house with only one TV. Even my grandparents had multiple TVs and I definitely had one in my room since I was 4.
A quick Google search says that 50% of households had more than one TV in 1980.
Same. I grew up in the 80's and we always had at least 2 TVs for a family of four. My sister and I both had small TVs in our bedroom once we were teens, so that was one TV per person at that point! To be fair, they were mostly used for video games...
I'm not being sarcastic. And I really don't think my household is that far above average. We have three "living room" type areas. One in each bedroom. One in my office. One in my wife's office. I'd wager the American average is >1 per person in the house.
Before we downsized to a 2 bedroom condo (where we do have 3), we had 6 in our house - our bedroom, son’s bedroom, home gym, living room, wife’s room and guest bedroom.
I don't understand how a trillion dollar company can't at this point say "you know what, I think we're good on the profit front, let's convert some of that into improving UX"
If only any of their former leaders and one of the most famous people ever had said something like "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will"...
Well maybe that kind of company would've been aggressive about always being competitive, yeah? Instead of whatever Tim Cook is doing...
> trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook.
This clearly isn’t the case—the iPad Pro got the M4 processor in May 2024; the Mac didn’t get the M4 until October. So for a few months, Apple’s most powerful chip was only available for the iPad Pro.
And while the M5 MacBook Pro and the M5 iPad Pro were announced together in October 2025, none of the other Mac models have been updated to the M5.
It’s possible more M5 Macs will be announced this week; we’ll see.
I don’t think it matters to Apple whether you spend $1,000+ for an iPad or for a MacBook.
I may be an outlier, but multi-user support might make me buy more iPads. Basically, an iPad Air for each major room in the house. Then my wife and I, plus guests, could pick up which ever one is closest.
Today, we just have on each and have to run around the house whenever we want it.
I think if people had a use case for it they’d buy more of the damn things. Right now I’d never need a device separate from my spouse since I just don’t need one.
Make is useful and buyers will come. The never had issues selling multiple macs frankly.
Playing devil’s advocate the only real device I truly would want to have multi user switching is the Vision Pro due to cost and features . If multiple users were to be added to the iPad would there be enough people to justify the long term use of the device ? I feel like this is a HN filter bubble desire just like small phones .
I think people want multi-user because most people still need their laptops for work (or hobbies sometimes). Otherwise, I'd be on my phone (for casual messaging, media consumption). iPad is mostly just sitting around most of time, so it can be quite easily shared b/w people in same household.
The stupid thing is that iPad does have this feature natively, but you need to use an MDM (or apple configurator profile) to access it.
I'm still of the opinion that there's a market, albeit a small one, for a "consumer" MDM product for use cases like this, better parental controls, etc. but almost all are for business and come with some kind of minimum device purchase like 30+ devices.
I found a thread on macpowerusers.com that recommended Jamf or Zoho that both have a free tier for Apple MDM. https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/mdm-for-family-home/39714/8 I'm kind of curious to try it out on my kids' iPads to make them interchangeable.
I’m not familiar with this but interested in trying it. From what I see they do and you need a certificate from them from a Enterprise Developer Account?
Apple has historically never been good at multiple users at the same machine. Even MacOS is still pretty bad at it. IMO incentives are not aligned here, they want everyone purchasing their own iPad, so i suspect that their strategy is to not invest too much into profile management as it risks cannibalizing their hardware sales.
Like 20 years ago OS X server had pretty great support for it.
I worked a university lab and had an account on the lab server. I could walk up to any computer in the lab and login and get the exact same desktop experience with all my files and settings. The computing power was all on the local machine, but it basically mounted my user folder from the server.
That was the only time I worked anywhere with that setup on Macs, but it worked so well. Though it was admittedly not your standard office environment — there were frequent compelling reasons for me to be using different machines in different parts of the lab, and not a lot of compelling reasons for me to use that account from a computer on a remote network.
20 years ago, I would still have bought a Mac, nowadays they don't sell any hardware that I would pay for.
I don't pay extra for have less options than on PC hardware, my desktop and laptops can be upgraded at will and without gunpoint prices (forgetting about the whole AI stuff that affects everyone anyway), thus all my use of Apple hardware is project specific and taken from the company's hardware pool.
This is such a weird take because it’s pretty well established that if you just need an average computing device that apples cheapest options are often dollar for dollar per compute efficiency way better than the competition.
If you need anything other than a base configuration that’s not true anymore because apple makes stupid money on their $200 upgrades of 8 gb of ram but if you are a low grade consumer who doesn’t need anything other than the base configuration you would be hard pressed to convince me that the base models of their products are worse value than their non apple equivalents
No they aren't, because Apple doesn't offer good gaming options, memory or hard disk sizes at comparable PC prices in tier 2, tier 3, .... world economies, only the rich kids of such nations can afford Apple prices.
It is only well established on the minds of those earning US salaries, or living in countries of similar economies, G8 style.
As a very simple example, airdrop to macOS with multiple logged in users will frequently pop up the confirmation notification in the user account that is not active.
I wonder if this was a design choice, so if I’m on the computer and a call comes in for them, I can let them know and maybe hand it off?
The alternative would be they would have to answer on their phone (assuming they have an iPhone, which may not always be the case), then use handoff to get it on the Mac.
Perhaps I don't understand it but the encryption security model for MacOS/iPadOS/iOS currently doesn't allow multiple different encryption keys for each user. So any user can decrypt the whole drive and while it does enforce user permissions, the security model can't support true multiuser.
I actually don't know if Windows or ChromeOS support this either but this is certainly something Linux can with LUKS et. al.
Non-admins getting prompts for system and app upgrades is mildly annoying. The bigger one in a family setting is the clunky sharing. There's no good way to share a photo library or music library between users. The Unix version of making a folder shared by a group doesn't usually work for Apple apps.
Switching users while changing displays often results in an incorrect resolution. That’s such a basic thing: different users have different preferences for their displays and keyboards attached to the displays. Yet this doesn’t work reliably, as if during some moments the login window just doesn’t want to adjust resolutions.
As soon as I added a 2nd user, my Samba share totally broke and days later I still don't have it working. It was fine for over a year and now I'm close to deleting my 2nd user just so I can access my Mac Mini across the network again.
From what I hear it works okay at best. You basically want to allocate a subset of iPads to a subset of users. You can't just throw 30 ipads onto a cart and let all 30 students randomly pick them, or you'll be evicting profiles unnecessarily. Would do fine in a small household. You reserve space based on # of profiles you want to cache.
Same here. Ours is just a streaming device. Because nobody can really own it. I won't put my password manager on it when the kids can use it, and without that it's near useless. It has my Signal profile so I can transfer stuff (and passwords) to the device but I already feel bad about that. My wife won't put Teams on it because it would bother others and conflict with all other MS accounts. The kids laptops have accounts for all 4 of us.
We switch in apps (ie in netflix). This whole "one person one device" just makes the iPad a shallow consumption device and keeps the laptops for work (and also often for streaming because of this. Btw they are all 2nd hand business laptops running Linux; for the Kids Gnome is very iPad/ChromeOS like and familiar).
It would be so much more useful a device, and maybe we'd even then start buying more, if we could just switch user profiles.
Oh, because it's just a consumption device when we "needed" another one, we got a Xiaomi. Who cares about al the niceties of the iPad anyway when all it does is show video.
I see where you are going but they are older laptops bought for cheap. But they do an incredible amount of work. And can be (and are) more easily shared because of the different accounts. I.e., my work laptop is upstairs, I use the laptop my daughter usually grabs and log in to find all my stuff (inc password manager).
I think I'd use our iPad more if it had profiles. And my laptop less. For my partner we're consider an iPad over a laptop atm. And then again it would be nice if the kids could also use it. But as-is it would be a single person device.
I agree 100%. When I purchased my Steam Deck, I was actually surprised that it was so easy to switch between Steam profiles. Last year, my wife and I tried Apple Vision Pro. While we aren't the target audience for a $3,500 headset, we might be tempted at $1,200. But not if each of us needs to buy our own.
I was also going to point out how awesome the Steam Deck multi-user experience is:
1. Turn on Steam Deck
2. Open Steam on your phone
3. Scan QR code
4. Choose whether or not to stay signed in on the Steam Deck
It is such a great UX that makes using the hardware very easy for any random Steam user who picks it up.
I'm sure the security angle would be something a lot of people would bring up, but if iPad had this feature, they could make great use of Apple's Data Protection Classes[1] to ensure that all per-user data is encrypted when that specific user is not logged in and actively using the device.
It's inexcusable that customers must beg the vendor for features, especially such trivial ones. It's your device. They shouldn't have any ability to stop you from adding it yourself, or paying someone to add it for you.
Profiles don't work well on Apple TVs at all though. You choose a profile on the device, and then you still have to choose a profile whenever you launch any given streaming app as well. I don't know what changing profiles on an Apple TV actually does.
I don’t know I think Apple should be able to keep COW filesystems for every user to apply atop a read only file system. Unique apps, unique settings (maybe unify tv settings into admin panel) and no cross-contamination or need for app owners to switch profiles. macOS software doesn’t need explicit understanding of profile switching, neither should iPadOS software.
In my household we have two Apple TVs sitting next to each other, and two remotes with the names of my partner and mine on them as most apps don't properly support profiles so that's the easiest solution. If they do that so people buy more devices...it's definitely working.
I also ended up doing this. With HDMI-CEC powering up the TV and the receiver automatically, then switching to the correct input on any AppleTV remote button press, this is actually a really friction free option if you can stomach buying two devices for the same purpose. I put the remotes in different colored rubber cases (red and blue) to make clear which device is being operated.
At one stage I even had a third AppleTV, that was hooked permanently to a VPN exiting in a foreign country, so I could get TV content and applications restricted to another region I watch a lot of content in. It was so nice to just pick up a remote and instantly have the foreign appleTV experience, rather than juggle VPN apps and foreign Apple Store accounts on the same device.
It’s the vendors not supporting platform features. Usually, actively avoiding it because they think it’d dilute their brand or some shit.
I solved this by just pirating everything and putting it in Jellyfin with Infuse on my AppleTV. Managing profiles and parental controls (and god forbid you also want actual curation) is just totally broken if you pay money for the content, but if you pirate it, it works. Go figure. Dropped from like seven or eight streaming services at peak to I think two. It’s not worth it for the savings, though that’s a nice bonus (it all ends up in hard drives or electricity anyway, though) but it’s the only way to get sane UX. Friggin’ irritating.
I'm not even sure I'd only see the fault with the vendors in this case, as I could very easily imagine that feature to be buggy (From Apples side) or not supporting some use cases that they might want, as no large streaming service seems to do it.
It's a bit similar to them not supporting Apple TV's "Continue Watching" feature as they don't want to hand over all their watch data to Apple.
In any case, once you have a good setup the pirating UX is very hard to beat (I'm looking forward to the day that Jellyfin on tvOS has feature parity with Plex, not a big fan of Infuse personally. That's the issue to follow for that: https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin/discussions/1294).
The one thing Infuse gets me is support for one fairly major audio codec (I forget which one). Have to pay for a license, doubt the official client will ever have it.
The UI is slightly janky out of the box but if you customize it it’s not bad. Key to note is that you probably want to use the “library” menu item for almost everything and drill down from there (that way you can filter by e.g. genre, or order by release date, or whatever, right up front) or else just go over to the entry for the server itself, which gets you a list of top-level items like you see in the Jellyfin web ui.
If you have much stuff at all you need to just ignore top level entries like “movies” or “tv” because (as far as I can tell) they’re just giant alphabetical lists of everything, which borders on useless. I think you can make them not show up at all. You just need search, “library”, and an entry for any server(s) you have to browse them “raw”.
I think the iPad could be a full desktop replacement if they rebuilt the OS as a branch from Mac OS vs as a branch of iOS and allowed for automatic switching based on what it is docked to. That would not be a small task and would fundamentally change the product, but it would be interesting especially for the iPad Pro. When in portable mode it functions as an iPad, but plug into a keyboard folio an it switches to a laptop; plug into a monitor and have it switch to desktop. Plug into a certain mag safe 3 charger in the kitchen and it switches to tvOS; unplug and it is right back to an iPad. I think this kind of user controllable context switching would be really compelling for an iPad, but it would be a complete reengineering an I am not sure the incentive is there.
I'm interested in the opposite direction too. If the iPad could do real phone calls and sms, I would ditch mobile phones. In the process I'd hope to reduce some screen time. I could live with Pod+Pad+Watch, but I doubt they'd ever make that happen :(
I really agree with this. Right now I have a folder on my wife’s iPad Air 13 with Claude, brave, and other nerdy apps. This is totally a workaround for not having profiles/multi login.
I agree that this would be an awesome feature, and it would also significantly enhance iPads' value for me.
That said, having worked on account/identity systems at another FAANG, I think that the commenters saying that Apple is holding this back purely to sell more iPads are underestimating the complexity of this feature.
This is not a feature that you just bolt on to the top. It will require a significant ground up rewrite of iOS' fundamentals if you want to support account switching without a full shut down of the device (and even with that, there are complications with shared storage).
There are likely tons of singletons across the iOS codebase for the "current account", and switching between users will easily lead to bugs where the new account shares/accesses state from the previous account.....and these "violations" are much harder to detect via static analysis than you might naively imagine.
UPDATE: I wasn't aware that Apple already supported a bunch of this via MDM. My only point was that if they didn't already build this into the foundational layer of the OS, then this is a very difficult feature to add later. If they already have this, then I don't have any defense left for them.
Shared iPad overview
Shared iPad allows more than one user to sign in to an iPad. The iPad needs to be supervised before Shared iPad can be used. Shared iPad can be used not only in education but also in business. Multiple users can use the iPad, and the user experiences can be personal even though the devices are shared.
Shared iPad requires a device management service and Managed Apple Accounts that an organization issues and owns. Users with a Managed Apple Account can then sign in to an organization-owned Shared iPad. Devices need to have at least 32 GB of storage and be supervised. The following devices support Shared iPad:
> Shared iPad requires a device management service and Managed Apple Accounts that an organization issues and owns
I don't want to have to do a bunch of sysadmin just so my wife and I can both see our own YouTube subscriptions on an iPad. Again, you could do this with zero fuss in 5 minutes on Windows XP.
I’m guessing the main (technical) hang-up is that it messes really badly with one of the most distinctive things about iPads vs other devices, which is extremely low time-to-interactive from any sleep state. Device been sitting on your desk untouched for three weeks? Pick it up and it’s ready to go almost before you are, and still with a useful amount of battery left (offer void for cellular models).
Not my experience. I have iPad Pro and I only use it for workouts. It sits on my workout machine and once or twice a week I try to watch a ~45 min episode while doing cardio. It’s always dead and needs constant charging. Never last more than 3 days without needing charging.
Weird, mine’s usually good for a month at least if it’s got a decent charge. I just picked mine up off a table in front of me and it hasn’t been plugged in for at least two weeks, instantly on, 82% charge. It’s an earlier Pro 12.9” though, I think the last pre-M-series model, though god I hope they didn’t screw up the battery life that badly in the M series.
If it’s not a regression in the newer models, my top 3 guesses would be:
1) Is it a cellular model? Those have phone-like battery life (non-cellular should have iPod-like battery life, I used to develop for these things and seeing a bunch of “good” Android tablets next to iPads and how huge the idle battery life difference was contributed to my going all-in on Apple, every model I’ve personally seen that’s non-cellular has weeks of useful battery life when idle)
2) Some accessory somehow forcing it to wake periodically? I have AirPods and an Apple Watch, and those don’t do it to mine, but maybe if they were malfunctioning or something, or maybe some other device is doing it.
3) Faulty hardware
[edit] fwiw I do have find-my enabled on everything, never noticed a hit from that.
Yeah something weird going on over there. Even my cheapo 2025 iPad with A16 chip ($300) lasts a few weeks if I don't use it - plenty of other non-Apple devices could really learn something about how power-saving mode is supposed to work.
Isn't it already possible with MDM? If so, do these problems all exist? I've considered using MDM just to get this feature, so I'm curious if anybody has experience with it.
There are other potential issues as well not listed on that page. Apple could address all of these though if they really wanted to roll the feature out broadly.
This is actually one of those things I think the EU should consider regulating. It then means kids can have proper parental controls as they often get introduced to things by being handed a parents phone every now and then.
Definitely needed, but also, personally I don't have a need for yet another screen in my life. My iPad is powered like once every two weeks, only when kids beg the shit out of me. I don't particularly enjoy it using it over macbook either. Perhaps OK as your main device if you don't need a laptop I guess.
It was rumored to be in the original prototypes and cut before launch. I don't know why. They also have very restrictive device limits per account / family and installing apps across accounts is a huge pain. I've mostly given up on solving that problem.
Apple is a closed ecosystem, multiple users feature is a opposite of that.
For example, it's hard to manage app store purchased Apps if it's easy to switch users in iPad. It's hard to manage iCloud sync when switching, it's also related with privacy.
The profiles work fine in Apple Classroom mode. Just a question of SSD space for the active profile(s) and a cloud source that can be used to swap them around if the SSD saturates.
I have two iPad minis, but they're so unfriendly to use they exist only to display home assistant dasboards. It's overkill, but only because I thought they would be good for other things when I bought them.
The mini is the only iPad I'm interested in. I finally bought one after years of dragging my heels waiting for multi-user support.
Still, I don't use it much. Mostly I'm not a tablet person, but also, the UX is just so bad. It's total abandonware and it shows. The keyboard often covers more than half the screen. The side drawer on maps will cover the "you are here pin" that's in the middle of the screen. And so on. They just don't even try.
Interestingly Apple TV now has this - which I find kind of annoying since it asks every time I turn on the tv. Agree though that profiles should be there.
my youngest uses our iPad. My wife and I have iPhones and MacBooks and never see the need to use an iPad (I much prefer keyboard input, I like to read paper books and I don't play games; I prefer watching movies on the laptop too). Our teen has a phone, does everything on there, and wouldn't use the iPad either, + laptop for school and some entertainment.
Wouldn't just good screen sharing solve your coffee table problem?
Just have the coffee table iPad be a display for your own iPad. You could even have a virtual iPad on your mac that you show on the coffee one if you don't have your own.
MacOS has 'high-performance' screen sharing using hardware encoder/decoder now. Windows has had this for years and it's so fast it's like actually using the remote computer. It's not like old-school VNC, the only real functional drawback is that you can't leave wifi range.
I hate this so much that I strongly considered creating a family Apple ID. Nowadays I’m just considering leaving Apple ecosystem altogether. Hopefully soon.
iPad is around 10% of Apple’s revenue. How many parents are going to give their kids their $1500 iPad Pro instead of just buying them a $300 low end iPad?
You can thank short-sighted, busy, unprincipled-asshole parents (like me and my wife) for this.
Would I buy each of my 3 kids an iPad every 2-3 years[1] if they had this capability? Hell fuck no. I'd let them use my iPad, which I myself don't even use that much.
But as soon as my kids started texting weird shit to business contacts, or accidentally declining meeting invites because they were playing ROBLOX and the notification was annoying — there was no choice. They'd already experienced the iPad, and I'm too busy to do the super-dad job of weaning them off screens in favor of paper books. Plus, iPads are actually really cool for kids, in a lot of ways.
But the lack of multi-user on iPad is unforgivable user-betrayal. It feels a lot like the gas station charging $25 for a 2L bottle of water right after the earthquake.
Might not be illegal, but... fuck you. The iPad is a great product but it leaves me with a burning napalm hatred for Apple in my heart, just the same as when I try to cancel a US newspaper subscription. Fuck you.
[1]: because, while admirably durable, kids do just wear them out and break them
You pick up the ipad off the coffee table, then what? This is the issue with the ipad since it has been released. What is the value proposition? Bigger iphone? Clumsier macbook? I guess it sells somehow or else tim cook would have shitcanned it already.
I use my 13” iPad Pro M4 almost as much as my MacBook Pro. I’m typing this on it right now. It is by far more comfortable for consuming any kind of media than a laptop.
If I’m researching something and I need to read any significant amount of text I’m going to grab my iPad and find a comfortable spot instead of sitting at my desk. Even though I have 2 big monitors.
I also have a Magic Keyboard that I can simply pop on if I need to write any significant amount, like this, and pop it off again for pure consumption.
It’s an amazing device for watching video (the tandem OLED looks incredible) and I often use the pencil to sketch out ideas.
It's not just that. The "Pro" nomenclature is useless if you work in software. It can't run anything despite all that power. The OS is basically crippled. For a few years, I used to run the GitHub cloud environment to work on software, but the latency would just make it insufferable. Any other alternatives, you would need to pay (replit, for example).
It's also quite heavy and bulky, so often times I would have to choose between carrying it or my Macbook Pro. And over time, I realized the MBP still was irreplaceable. I switched back to my MBP and physical books after lying to myself reading book on an iPad Pro was somehow better for nearly 3 years. Sold it off at a loss, but feels better without the useless paper weight in my bag.
There's nothing Apple can tell me to make me buy another iPad ever in my lifetime...unless it runs OS X (non-crippled).
I find this especially galling on the high-price configs, which essentially cost the same as well specified MacBooks. I am in the situation right now where I have 4 iPads in my home which could easily be replaced by 1 to 2 with support for multiple user accounts.
Apple have built much of the software infrastructure to support multiple users on iPadOS, the feature exists for education market customers etc:
I also suspect someone at Apple has run the numbers on device sales and has decided the status quo where an iPad is a 1:1 device and makes more money for the company is preferable.
I was pretty surprised when the AppleTV of all things got multiple-user account login support before the iPad did!
I an afraid the same will happen with iPhone foldable. No, it doesn't need to have multiuser support, but how does Tim make you still want an iPad? And macOS - through limitations.
I'm about to head to the gym with my 12.9-inch 2017 vintage iPad Pro, which is still going strong. I prop it up on the elliptical trainer every other day or so for entertaining me while I grind out an hour of cardio. I use it for reading, watching YouTube, listening to music, audiobooks, etc. It's been my regular gym buddy for years, and is showing no signs of needing to be replaced.
It's stuck on iPadOS 17.7.10, which is fine. I can only imagine that these new generation iPads will easily go for the next 10 years.
Same! Reading through that announcement about MOAR power and AI and all I can think is, "This can't possibly play YouTube videos at me on my spin bike any better than my iPad from 8 years ago..."
Not needing to charge as much due to much better battery capacity and/or usage efficiency is objectively a good thing, full stop.
How that additional time is actually spent is a whole separate story, but that's entirely tangential to assessing the impact of battery life improving.
In the 1990s we referred to this dilemma as needing a “killer app” to drive an upgrade. Fortunately everything needed more mips, but unless you’re a niche gamer, consumers hit the wall in maybe 2010. Which is why every oem is pushing Ai. Sell moar !! Fill the landfills !!!
I had an even older iPad I was happily using for similar use cases. Until one day a family member bricked it and I needed to factory reset. No big deal, I thought -- nothing important on it. Turns out it needed to phone home to do the factory reset, and since the server it wanted to talk to was no longer up (or perhaps the address changed?) I couldn't factory reset the iPad.
If someone has a work-around I'd love to hear it. Until then, or until Apple changes this design, I think I'm done with iPads. I don't want to pay that much to "own" something that Apple can simply make obsolete by reconfiguring or turning off a server somewhere.
There are “service providers” on EBay that I’ve used in the past to unlock iPads used by former unresponsive employees. Not sure about exact situation, in my case they defeated the iCloud lock. Was about a $100 a pop. All done remotely.
My iPad Pro must by the model ahead of yours. I just upgraded the OS to v26 and it’s awful - sluggish, jittery, inconsistent typing experience - borderline unusable for a fast work environment. With no downgrade option I’m forced to buy a new one for work and relegate the older device to entertainment or kids use only.
Being stuck on v17 is a feature for the older A-series chipset.
I'm in the same boat. Thankfully, I only use my iPad for watching videos while I'm cooking, but if were using it for anything else, I'd have to replace it.
When cleaning out my deceased father's electronics closet, I found a 1st gen iPhone. Fortunately its charging cable was nearby. I charged it and, miraculously, it turned on, and was in fact fully usable (minus calling, due to no SIM card). Note that the device is almost 20 years old at this point.
In contrast, none of the various Android devices he collected over the years turned on. One came close, then errored out right after booting.
> It's one of those devices that just quietly do their job forever.
Except for the battery, which isn’t that easy to replace on an iPad. And apps relying on anything online (including browsers) stop functioning at some point, because you can’t replace the OS or install arbitrary apps.
Is it significantly worse than an iPhone? I've opened up iPhones 4, 5s, 7, 8, and 13 to do home battery swaps, and none were particularly horrid, especially if you'd not passionate about trying to restore the factory water-seal adhesive on newer models.
An iPhone 13 is also a shitload of glue around the screen, though pulling apart an iPad sized device using suction cups does sound especially hair-raising.
I mean, you can take your iPad back to Apple and have them replace the battery, you know. For my current one (a "4th generation" Air) that'd be $120, which is not cheap, but it's cheaper than replacing it for $700 and a lot less stressful than trying to replace the battery myself.
(Having said that, I'm not ruling out replacing it, but I don't think I'll be inclined to do that until they stop updating its version of iPadOS.)
Old ipads are great until apps start not working with the OS. I have a 2017 and Disney+ just dropped support for my current OS version and I can't update further.
if you can put up with each update making it worse, slower, less precise user interface. There's a reason old macs run linux rather than macos or go to landfil.
For the amount charged they should be usable for 15-20 years. Enschittification is very much an apple thing. Cue outraged apple cult memebers.
I've got an iphone 6 that doesn't, along with a couple of ipads that switch on but are useless and a couple of macs that now have to run linux to be useful in any way.
I've also got an iphone 15 pro that has started on on the enschittification update path. Pauses after presses, many more typos and it's just not slick and nice like when it was new.
But sure, in my experience, apple zelaots just won't believe it happens even while observing it.
Man, the iPhone 15 Pro is the absolute worst iPhone experience I had thus far, really makes me reconsider if I shouldn't just get a cheap android next time. Most definitely not worth the premium.
An old iPadOS means an old safari, which means some of the websites are going to get suspicious. I remember one day not being able to open any Cloudflare website.
How old was the device? I have a Late 2018 iPad Pro and have never encountered anything like this. It still works perfectly fine, and having invested in the nice keyboard case for it, I'm hoping to not have to upgrade for a while longer. It honestly might last me 10 years without breaking a sweat.
I have the 2g iPad pro (I think I bought it in 2020 before the pandemic?). I keep looking for an excuse to replace it but it just works so well there isn't much to get from a new one.
My iPad 2011 is still going strong, except that my Airpods Pro won't talk with them anymore.
So should I buy a second pair of work-out earphones or a new tablet? A new tablet would give me back access to app store and many apps, which are no longer compatible with this old slab, but at least Amazon Prime Video and most importantly, VLC still works.
I’d buy a new (or used) tablet. An iPad 10th gen can be had lightly used or refurb for under $200. Or go with the brand new 12th gen that is supposed to be coming out tomorrow at $349 if you’re not on a super tight budget and want it to last you as long as that ancient one did.
Yeah, I think the number 1 use case for tablets is "portable TV" followed by "makeshift touchscreen kiosk". It really doesn't need a lot of features. I have an iPad setup as a little home dashboard and it's literally stuck on iOS 9 but it does it's job.
The newer have worse ergonomics than the old ones. I used to use my previous ipads all the time for reading, but now I find them all fairly uncomfortable for reading and end up not using them. Slightly tempted to sell them and get older models tbh
How was the battery held up? I have the same one, but the battery lasts only 25 minutes max, pretty sure it's shot. Any tips on making sure battery lasts a while? I might even switch out the battery myself.
Lightning cable unfortunately has a shelf life. My current SE2 barely seats the cable appropriately in the connector and if you look at it wrong it stops charging.
That's what I use a 2014 Sony tablet for. The battery last surprisingly long, but heavy websites are an exercise (well, the other form of exercise) in frustration
How is the battery doing? I find sudden rechargeable battery/controller failures in the 5-10 year range to be my most common cause of upgrade or repair.
Kind of luck of the draw on that one, I think. I have a first-gen iPad Mini on its original battery around here somewhere. Doesn't run for more than a couple of hours on a charge, but it also hasn't exploded yet...
Honestly this is iPads biggest problem. My is from 2019, and there’s just no reason to upgrade, unlike a phone I don’t need it to have a better camera or be lighter or whatever. They nailed it years ago and the hardware is so good the software never really challenges it.
On the other hand, that’s also one of the best things about it. Part of what makes it worth the cost is that nothing important changes and it can last for a long time.
Depends on how you look at it. While the hardware might keep functioning and current software might keep running, some devs also deprecate their software. I have an old 6S+ that I keep software that I don't want to install on my actual device. Slack informed me that it will no longer function after a date set later this year. Other apps have already stopped working on it because the devs do not want to deal with it.
TL;DR sometimes it's not Apple, it's the app devs that deprecate them.
I have a google nexus 7 tablet from 2013. Thanks to Google unlocking all their bootloaders by default, I can install u-boot and a modern linux kernel on it (thanks PostmarketOS).
Since linux runs on it, I can run the latest versions of great pieces of software like ed, slack in a web browser, etc.
It is 100% apple's fault that they do not open up the bootloader for devices they'll no longer offer updates for and allow the community to build a custom darwin or linux fork. Even though we paid for the hardware, we are not allowed to use it any longer than apple says.
> TL;DR sometimes it's not Apple, it's the app devs that deprecate them.
Are the app devs deprecating just because their support matrix is too big, or because current SDKs will no longer build apps compatible with those devices?
I think the later case is less common on the Android side of the fence, but Apple is not great about keeping old versions of the dev tools functional, and you end up needing to keep elderly Macs around to target older versions of the OS.
The primary hard part is testing the old versions. Xcode has decent backdeploy support (Xcode 26 supports targeting iOS 15, the final version to run on the 6S), but there's no way to actually verify that it works other than on an older device that's never been upgraded. It's a pretty substantial increase in testing burden and greatly increases the size of the pile of phones that you need to janitor for your CI setup.
Submitting apps to the app store requires using the latest version of Xcode (with a ~half year lag after a new one comes out), so it's now impossible to submit an update to the app store that supports iOS <15.
It’s because every supported version multiplies support burden and sometimes can prevent use of new APIs that substantially improve quality of life unless the dev is willing to turn their code into a patchwork quilt of version checks (which brings its own problems).
On Android it’s less of an issue because the SDK ships separately from the system, but there are often still substantial behavioral differences between system versions under the same SDK that can be a real pain in the rear, especially when it comes to permissions-related issues. This why it’s common for Android apps to have odd bugs or behave strangely on ancient versions of Android — while it’s easy for the dev to produce a build technically runs on a wide range of versions, properly testing against all those permutations of versions and manufacturer skins is practically speaking impossible unless you’re a sizable company that keeps a lab full of devices with CI rigged up to test against them all.
As ex-iOS dev, usually it's because devs want the new shinny APIs. And after some point stakeholders are OK to stop supporting a tiny percentage of users stuck on old iOS versions. In my experience it was never because of Apple.
I cannot buy a device without resorting to Ebay to test my app on iOS 17. There are still bugs that manifest themselves on real devices and not on the simulator. And some APIs are just broken on the older releases.
There is no greater punishment for a corporation’s shareholders and employees than making a product so good and so reliable it doesn’t need to be replaced for a very long time.
Which is... an odd thing to say because Apple's support is ~7 years nowadays, which is more than most of their competition, and their devices are not EOL by then. And yet they're one of the biggest / wealthiest companies in the world.
I think your comment is incorrect. some companies / shareholders push for planned obsolescence, but I can't accuse Apple of that.
I am not sure if you are being sarcastic here (the tone needed to identify it doesn't work well in the internet).
But yes. My view on the issue is: companies need to support their products with software for a predefined time and after that they should be forec to open source everything needed so people can keep the thing running themselves.
Can you explain? Good rules on long term maintenance and repairability (which are in effect, see [0]) allow for cheaper, secondhand devices to remain viable for said poorer people. Market forces also exist so you can get a tablet or smartphone for less than €100 - and they also fall under said laws so they should work and be supported for a reasonable amount of time.
You think regulations on planned obsolescence punish poorer people? How? As someone who had a friend who would only eat white bread at the end of the month having his old laptop not work would be a freaking emergency.
I owned a few iPads as a kid but as I get older I see less and less reason to buy one.
It kinda sits in the middle of usefulness of a phone and laptop for me. Larger screen than phone yes, but can't run any of the applications I need from a laptop. If it had MacOS, I'd be much more inclined to buy it.
I bought the 1st Gen iPad for my daughter while I was in the States for work (2010). Not a phone, big enough, and can be Internet-connected with a SIM. Lots of Games, and later my feeling of having bought something amazing was that my daughter learnt to speak brilliant English with Peppa Pig, way before her formal school started.
Palo Alto Stanford Shopping (USA) › FedEx to a Relative in Maine (USA) traveling to Manipur (India) › he trimmed a local SIM to fit the Nano-SIM tray › Happy Daughter on her 2nd Birthday.
I remember the total uproar about the name! Everyone said it was too close to a Feminine hygiene product, or too close to iPod. Nobody's complaining any more.
entire generation of kids have grown up since introduction of iphone/ipad... I'm sort of glad I got to live what world was like before internet though, still escape into the mountains with kids so they can some of that disconnected feeling but with starlink hovering overhead nowadays just don't feel the same anymore
My dad was at Stanford in 84, when the original Mac was announced. We were a Mac family from even before I was born. I watched Steve Jobs give the Macworld keynotes back before everyday people knew who he was.
When I was in college, I actually bought a TabletPC. I still identified as a Mac user - I even tried making it into a Hackintosh - but being able to draw and use gestures was interesting enough that I tolerated Windows on that device.
The day the iPad was released, my parents impulse-bought one. They were heading on an overseas trip that week and thought it would be a fun gadget to bring along.
They had me set it up for them, and I did exactly that. I didn't tinker with it, play around on it, pretend it was mine for an evening… It's the first time I remember a gadget not feeling like a new toy, even though I had spent my formative years dreaming about how cool a Mac you could draw on would be. It was just an object, and I had no interest in it beyond being a helpful family member.
Making "just a big phone" when their phone platform has always been so locked down has done the iPad concept a major disservice.
My current gen Mini is my Reeder, HN, and Balatro machine. Balatro is intolerable on my 15 Max. $400 well spent and i dont care to share it anyone else.
same here. Drawing on my 13in M3 Air is a delight with the pencil. I sometimes try to do productivity stuff on it like sitting in zoom calls while multitasking on an external monitor, but it's not a very good experience on iOS 18.6
I would have been using iPads as my primary computing device for the past 10+ years if they gave us root access. Without root they aren't usable and I refuse to buy them.
I got one a few years ago for drawing on, so far I haven't found it useful for much else. I got the 12.9" one which makes it hard to hold so it sits on a stand.
Later I plan to use it as a lighting control panel but other than that the use cases are limited.
I'm kind of surprised that Apple hasn't full throttle on foldables. I'm more apt to spend $2500 on a foldable iPhone than I am $1500 on an iPhone and an iPad. I don't think I'm alone here.
When they introduce their first foldable device this year, keep in mind that Apple has been ideating on and prototyping concept devices with foldable displays long before working prototypes of foldable screens existed. The first Apple patent related to devices with flexible displays was filed in 2011. The first Apple patent related to hinges for foldable devices was filed in 2015.
Foldable device prototypes were publicly demonstrated in 2013. It took five years for the technologies required to enable foldable devices to become mature enough to ship bad products. It took another five years for them to mature enough to meet Apple's scale and quality requirements.
This isn't a "moonshot" (which take decades to build), but hardware innovations like this regularly take a decade to properly productize.
They're quite scared to take risks I think, from what I heard it seems it was meant to be released already but they've delayed it a bunch, I wonder if in part due to AVP failure.
This is a bizarre way of saying “if they ship it and it has reliability problems, they know they’re skating on thin ice”.
Apple’s brand has taken a beating (I’m as aghast with the latest macOS as the next nerd), but people love that when Apple ships a product, it generally works and the hardware doesn’t break.
Butterfly keyboards are a terrible stain on the hardware team’s reputation. “Scared” is the wrong word for how these things work.
It's expensive (though largely comparable to business machines) so people dunk on it being low value for money,
People dunk on them for not taking risks, but when there's a reliability problem that would be sort-of acceptable for another product it becomes international news.
When they do take "risks" (like USB-C only) people dunk on them for taking away choice.
Now, I'll be the first to admit, I'm one of the people dunking on them a lot, I was not a fan of the headphone jack removal, butterfly keyboards, discoverability of 3D touch, change of UI paradigm away from Skeumorphism etc;etc;etc -- but I feel like a lot of the other manufacturers seem to get a comparative free pass, which feels unfair.
But the leaks I've seen of the size, makes me less excited about it. The phone when folded looks a bit wider and squatter than my Pro Max. And when open, it's smaller than my 11" iPad.
I see the promise of this concept with the tri-fold phones, where when expanded is closer in size to an 11" tablet.
My mom has loved the form factor, currently loves it and will continue to love it. That’s basically her hour or two of downtime at night. It’s the perfect form factor for consumers.
I genuinely don’t get the purpose of these high end processors in a tablet. Like more power is nice but what would I do on it that needs it?
Serious gamers mostly steer clear of Apple. Video editors presumably use desktops/laptops. Browsing doesn’t need power. Video watching doesn’t need it. Programming on iPads is cumbersome.
You'd be surprised by the horsepower some games require, my wife plays Love and Deep Space and she recently just bought a new iPad because the game requires some good specs and a LOT of storage space. She's not a "serious gamer" as your parlance.
But the iPad is not a console … it doesn’t even do Steam. All that horsepower to play … a couple of forever titles and that’s it.
I have the M1 iPad Air and it has never used that processor to its fullest. I think iPad is just an odd device for most people
People are bad with scale, everyone thinks moves make a lot of money. They really don't.
Just Gaming in general made something like $200 BILLION in revenue in 2025. Movies made ... $33B globally.
And of that $200B, mobile games were over half.
If the average HN'er would just think of the money they spend on their hobbies (or don't it usually doesn't end well =P) and now apply that to mobile games. They're a hobby or a way to relax for millions and millions of people.
They pay for the "predatory IAPs" because they consider the $10 spent a good investment on the fun they're having in the game they play.
There's a specific group of people who just have the mindset of "never pay real money for anything in a game" - I'm one of them. But even I have to admit that I'm in the minority.
Exactly. They read headlines like "Game X did 100 MILLION revenue in 2025!" and think that's a lot, meanwhile mobile games nobody's even heard of do 20x that.
But I'd argue that the demographics for "people that read gaming news websites" and "people that play and pay for lucrative mobile games" hardly overlap.
On the go video / photo editing is AMAZING on my iPad! More power speeds up some the effects / transition editing. Batch processing, all with a device that has great battery life and is smaller than a magazine. For super heavy stuff, sure, use my Mac, but when I travel and want to be productive on the go, the iPad is awesome!
But that's the thing, most "gamers" aren't the ones that games that normally on Steam are targeting. Mobile Gaming is almost double the size of Console Gaming by revenue. Some people just like having a huge screen for their games.
I've found a tablet convenient in 3 situations: Watching video, reading ebooks or displaying sheet music. (And a single tablet is rarely very good for more than 2 of these at a time.) Otherwise it's either too cumbersome or the I/O is too useless.
I do wonder about this too… I'm cutting 4K video and doing SwiftUI development on an M1 MacBook Air. My current plan is to upgrade next year, but only if they upgrade the screen. An M4 seems like a dramatic over-spec for a tablet.
This is a very naive take - the iPad and iPhone are both multibillion gaming devices, and to dismiss it is short-sighted.
I'd even claim (but can't look up statistics due to a restrictive company network) that singular mobile games like Honor of Kings generate more revenue than 95% of Steam games. Yet a lot of people that style themselves gamers (like myself) never even heard of it.
Yeah, maybe I'm too much of a "real gamer" but my iPad sits unused. The quality (and greediness!) of games on the iOS App Store is often worse than the direct-download console slop.
No software? DaVinci Resolve? Affinity Designer? Final Cut, Procreate, AUM, Logic Pro etc etc etc. As the processors get more powerful more demanding software can be made for it. Running multiple physical modeling AUVs along with FX loops eat up clock cycles. Final Cut Camera on iPhones along with Final Cut on an iPad allow for full multi camera controls and recording from 4 different iPhones with ProRes and log shooting at the same time.
If Apple hadn't continually upgraded the processing power then none of those programs would work. It's up to Apple to make compelling hardware. Better hardware allows more advanced programs. iPads are amazing.
The Procreate UI literally tells us otherwise. When you create a new image, it tells you exactly how many layers it will allow you to have based on the dimensions you set. This number is smaller for older iPads.
Thats the one I would buy if I were thinking of upgrading right now. We expect new models every year at this point, thats been the strategy of Apple for many years at this point
Music production is the killer feature that benefits a lot from CPU performance.
I only recently bought an iPad for the first time this year after realizing this was feasible. I’ve always preferred digital music workflows, but hated dealing with a laptop and DAW. iOS supports AUv3 plugins and cross app audio, so it’s pretty much a full DAW experience (I use loopy pro). The form factor forces AUv3 devs to design smarter interfaces.
Plus, I dislike using the iPad for literally anything else, so I’m less likely to get distracted :)
Can you expand on this, as im having a hard time comprehending. At the least, a laptop is a tablet with a built in stand :). How is a laptop hard to deal with?
Music production with a DAW is better on a computer. Music performance is much better on an iPad. There is a big difference between direct touch controls and using a trackpad. Apps like AUM and AniMoog Z highlight what makes music making on an iPad amazing.
And people here don't want to hear this but the closed nature of the App Store is why audio is so strong on both ios and iPadOS. There are far more music apps for those OSes than Android. In addition to that, many VSTs made for DAWS are available on iPads as AUV at much lower prices than Mac or Windows. The lack of piracy, narrow build targets, and predictably great audio implementation makes it both easier to build and more profitable than other platforms.
And IIRC for the longest time Android had massive latency issues with audio production. Just the whole framework was a bit shit and then you have small variations between manufacturers.
On iOS the basic system was flawless and there is no variance as every single iPad is the same and there's a finite amount of devices devs need to test on.
It's probably the immediacy. You click an app and you get a fullscreen touch UI with no distractions. Quite different to opening a slow-loading DAW and starting up various plugin windows inside it.
iPad music apps are typically priced far lower than the equivalent PC apps, and there's a thriving community of iOS-only development as well.
For me it's the sweet spot between hardware (which is expensive and annoying to cable up) and PC VSTs (I associate my laptop with work). The fact the iPad can also be used for videos/books/drawing/note taking is just a bonus.
I pretty much agree with all the people who replied. VSTs with heterogeneous interfaces, windowing issues, and having to use a mouse all just get in the way of making music for me. Obviously you wouldn’t produce / master some serious but if you’re jamming it’s leagues better imo
Better chip = better performance per watt = longer batteries for similar levels of performance, running cooler. Also it never hurts the smoothness of the interface.
It just ultimately makes it a nicer device to use.
Artists benefit hugely from the extra horsepower. My brother works in the animation industry and uses an ipad as his primary work device when travelling.
iPad is the most absurd device ever. It is fully capable of running a full blown general purpose OS, but artificially restricted to be a YouTube machine. Something you give kids in a restaurant to be quiet. Putting an M4 in it is like Apple rubbing our faces in it. Look at this device that could do everything, but can't do anything.
Comments like yours just go on to show how narrow the worldview of many HN users is. Just because you don't know how people are using their iPads doesn't mean iPads "can't do anything". It defies common sense, too. If iPads couldn't do anything, why would people buy them consistently? I can imagine people buying them once because they don't know any better. But iPad is more than 15 years old now.
I know exactly how it's used. I said in my comment it's used by kids to watch YouTube. By age 4, 58% of children have their own tablet. And YouTube is the #1 app for iPad. This is the majority use case, next to collecting dust on a shelf, or gifts for people's aging parents.
You don't think an M4 chip, amazing, screen, form factor, quality - all for children to watch YouTube videos with is absurd? TSMC all busy making 3nm chips to be used for watching CoComelon. An amazingly powerful, affordable device that is totally locked out of being used for general purpose computing. That doesn't irritate you?
The complaint isn't that iPad is useless, but that it would be equally useful to nearly every happy iPad user if it had a few generations older CPU.
iPad works for lots of people, but the things that iPad is best for don't really need a powerful CPU.
There are few "Pro" apps that you can run to prove it's possible to run them (except for plugins, OS-level helper apps, extra hardware, background processing that doesn't randomly die, scripting more fine-grained than shortcuts, competent file browser, etc.) but you can max out the CPU for a few minutes and go back to a macbook for real work.
It's a spec bump, soon they'll introduce M5 powered iPads. More GPU cores, more neural engine cores, more unified memory -- eventually iPadOS features will spring up to take advantage of this stuff. I assume the target audience for this is folks who want to make future-proof purchases or those who likely have more money than sense.
They're half a second away from offering an iPad running MacOS (or a tablet MacBook, take your pick). They're baby-stepping their way to this, obviously.
I've yet to figure anything you can do with these but watch videos and play some games; I always end up grabbing the laptop.
Doubt. Apple doesn't see hardware sales as a primary revenue driver, rather they're a rent-seeking company that makes money by being the iron-fisted middleman for the app store. They don't see any benefit from user freedom if it makes them less money in the end.
My iPad wins by a large margin the lowest bang for bucks of any competing device I ever purchased
A locked down device with no multitasking, even the browser download is interrupted if I switch away.
The true embodiment of paternalism, it protects you from all the scam in the world, except the noble ones who are willing to pay the 30% share.
It has some multitasking on the latest versions of iOS. You can drag a YouTube window up by the bottom right corner and open a Reddit window on another part or the screen if you truly need to be distracted from distraction by distraction.
The iPad and MacBook teams have been in market competition for nearly a decade now while clearly Apple corporate strategy has been trying to nerf each line to prevent them from actually competing. It's an artificial tension that gets more pronounced as the devices get more capable in other ways and the induced limitations are more glaringly obvious.
macOS is the main reason I’m using mac, though. the whole integration with the Apple ecosystem is the important thing, the hardware itself is overpriced
My current iPad is the iPad Air 3 (the one with the backlight issue that's never been acknowledged, to my understanding.)
Can someone explain to me why an iPad at all, let alone an iPad Air, needs as powerful a processor as a M4? That's stronger than my laptop (a M2) where I run multiple VMs and more.
The newer CPUs are more efficient and faster. In a mobile format you want the CPU to process everything as fast as possible and then return to a low power mode for battery life.
Apple re-uses the same core across their lineup because it’s cheaper to build 100 million of the same core than to design and maintain two separate CPUs that go into 50 million devices each.
Do they really do it just because it's cheaper? I thought they did it for each generation to offer the best of that generation; it makes sense for more powerful chips to have more cores and higher capacity, but it doesn't make sense for each core to arbitrarily be less efficient or less performant just because you didn't buy more of them. Especially because this approach makes the base models an extraordinarily high value compared to base models from competitors.
Yeah, devs using top of the line MBPs and taking a “works on my machine” attitude keeps web bloat on a constant incline.
I sometimes wish it were an industry norm for devs (a group of which I am a member) to be required to use a $300 Walmart special laptop for a week every two months.
I have an iPad for the purpose of 3D modeling in Nomad Sculpt and Shapr3D. It’s an M2 Air, it’s still way overkill, and I’m regularly frustrated at how limited every piece of iPadOS software is compared to the hardware. The dichotomy of prioritizing iPad hardware but iPadOS being arguably their worst actively developed software is baffling.
Maybe there are people out there doing 8k video editing on their Pros, but I’ve yet to meet them.
Apple seems to prioritize hardware upgrades without matching the software capabilities, which is evident for users like you. It’s frustrating to have powerful devices that can’t fully utilize their potential due to OS limitations.
In theory it improves battery life by doing more for less power. It also future proofs it for future workloads giving it an extended lifespan. Also note that thermals will limit what this is capable of compared to your laptop.
There are some decently powerful apps available, like Final Cut Pro, and there is multi-window support including external displays.
I think the percentage of iPad users actually using this level of processing power is small, but there are some ways to do it.
I do really wish they would just allow running a VM on an iPad though at this point. Running a linux or even MacOS VM would be a nice escape valve for a lot of things that can't be done natively.
Can you explain, why not? If it’s easier for Apple to just maintain a fewer series of chips going forward, why not keep it up to date?
If your question is what do people use it for? Well thats different. iPads have a range of users from people who just browse the internet and will never stress this out, to people who do concept art and CAD who will appreciate the power.
But again, why do people always complain that a device got a spec bump?
In theory an iPad is a computer and then you could run whatever you want on it. So maybe the better question is, why can't you run whatever you want on it?
If you're in the apple ecosystem, the "normal" way is to just literally drag and drop files between devices with your mouse, use airdrop, copy on one device then paste on another, etc. "Continuity" makes it stupidly easy, but not advertised well.
Some creative workflows genuinely benefit from the tablet form factor. I often do serious photo editing on the iPad because I have access to Apple Pencil, and, somehow, holding the thing in my hands like an actual physical object activates some different more analog brain region for me than using a laptop / desktop, and it’s helpful to my creative process. Lightroom for iPad is quite capable but it requires some power.
And then visual artists are often using Procreate, and those files can get heavy as well.
Plus, it’s nice to carry my iPad around with me in a sling and work in a cafe whenever I feel like it. I wouldn’t want to do that with my 16” MBP.
It's not like Apple is putting any thought into either the UX or the engineering side of utilising the compute properly (except calculating those glass effects extra inefficiently).
Minimise SKUs and get some use out of the binned chips who have a few failed cores.
It doesn’t necessarily need it other than for niche use cases, but they can’t well have the SoCs stagnate for many years, because SoC updates drive upgrades, whether the buyers really need it or not.
I wonder if a big part of it is simplification at Apples end. It’s just easier and more cost effective to make more M4s regardless of where they end up?
Those devices are too young to start lagging. Eventually websites will bloat to the point that you will definitely notice. My estimate is that it will be at the 7 year point.
Apple made a non-technological and purely artificial and somewhat capricious decision to not sell a product that was worthy of the Apple brand.
They continue down this road because next quarter is more important than next year, and sycophants continue to buy unusable products just to show off the Apple logo to people who don't view it as a Veblen good.
Apple could choose to sell to everyone, but instead sell to a minority. This is a choice. During recessions, it is not a good choice, and we have been in an almost persistent global recession since 2008.
As long as Apple can claim they have a $1T market cap, nobody wants to hear that the emperor is buck naked.
I think the big difference why I would go for a pro if I ever replace my mini is ProMotion. It seems like even in this new model you are stuck with the old lower refresh rate which is quite jarring.
Performance wise, even older ipads were well beyond what I need so if you can handle lower refresh rate for sure a better deal.
There's even a paragraph saying it's good for the environment. This means Apple really cares about the environment. That's good! So I suppose I can install my community OS of choice painlessly after Apple decides to stop supporting it so it doesn't turn into e-waste that day despite being perfectly good hardware for many more years?
I also suppose parts can be easily replaced without also replacing everything including the motherboard should something stop working?
Sarcasm, obviously, but until they do these things, their environment selling point is just irritating and scandalous and they should just focus on the other selling points.
Between the iPad Air and iPhone 17e it's definitely the "value" day. It will just be a ramp up to the MacBook Pro. Makes a good contrast and marketing scheme.
GarageBand is fun, and capable of making surprisingly complex music. Logic Pro is also available on iPad now, but it's only available with a $15/month subscription, so I haven't tried it.
For artists, there are a lot of good tools: Procreate, Art Set 4, Adobe Fresco, Artrage, etc.
iPad + Korg microKEY-37 + KORG Gadget 3 + all a bunch of KORG apps
No subscriptions. Keyboard is wireless but no noticeable latency. In my workflow I pretty much never need more keys but if I do I just use a MIDI adapter and plug a larger keyboard.
KORG apps go on 50% sale several times every year.
Still subpar, only real DAW available is Logic Pro, the audio stack behaves differently than macOS, no support for VSTs but has support for the AU format.
A friend who I make music together had an iPad that we tried to add to the setup, in the end after some months we chucked it aside and just got a MacBook for our shared studio instead.
I agree you won’t find a DAW as powerful, but some of the purpose built DAWs are so much fun. Loopy Pro you can build whatever interface you want via widgets.
And while VSTs don’t run, the AUv3s on the App Store tend to be much cheaper.
If for nothing else, I think it’s an excellent replacement for a guitar effects processor like Helix. Plus everything is backed up / restorable and you don’t have to suffer with a knob-based interface
Ideally Apple would finally do their Surface/2-1 with iPads, but Apple being Apple, rather sell an overpowered tablet, and a Mac laptop to go alongside with it
I don't think even Apple knows what they want to do with the iPad.
I could buy the "companion device" niche for a while until iPad OS 26 came along, which took away most of the "touch first" multi tasking and replaced it with a model that heavily favors mouse and keyboard use. I actually use my iPad less now since the update, because I still primarily used it as a tablet, I don't even own the magic keyboard/trackpad for it.
Now it's essentially a gimped macbook, and it's not really clear on where it fits in their product lineup. Is it supposed to be a laptop replacement? A companion device? An art tool? An expensive e-reader? No one, not even Apple, knows.
So yeah, they either need to come up with a clear vision for what it's supposed to be, or finally just let it be a 2-in-1 macbook with apple pencil support.
I think they’re very happy to have the 2 parallel product lines; they might overlap a bit but who cares, business is about the numbers, not ideological purity of product lines.
The line they’ll probably never cross is that the Mac can run software in a (mostly) non sandboxed mode, with unrestricted background processes, which means it’ll always be the platform of choice for developers. Those extra restrictions on the iPad makes them more free to push it/experiment with it in the direction they wish (for better or worse, as we’ve seen with all the wonky windowing implementations, although the current one is mostly fine)
I love my iPad for drawing/photography, reading comics, and its extreme portability; I love my MacBook as a developer and as my main productivity machine.
Apple has no idea what the iPad is for but somehow they sell 20 million of them a year...
Apple has been very clear what the iPad is "supposed" to be. It is a touch screen computer. Between its form factor, touch first OS, built in camera, and possible cellular capabilities it can do a lot that a Mac can't do. Something as simple as walking around with it and handing it to someone like a clipboard opens up a million uses in the field that would be much more awkward with a traditional laptop. Artists drawing directly on the surface, musicians playing with touch controls, etc. all take advantage of how the iPad works.
If you insist on using programs and workflows designed for laptop computers the iPad will never make sense to you. I use AUM, Drambo, and a variety of other soft synths and effects on my iPad in conjunction with my analog synths. It's a very different experience than a regular computer.
As always, I _wish_ I had a use case for an iPad. Seem like such powerful machines hindered by where they live in the serious-computing space. The iPadOS being much more restrictive doesn't help either.
I wish they could repurpose macOS to touch screens... Oh well.
The Apple of the past never thought twice about people complaining about the lack of them implementing something that would be bad UX because they were confident in their design prowess.
As the sibling says you can turn it off, but even the non-windowed UI is still not well-adapted to the small form factor. Apple doesn’t put any work into it. One can hope that some improvements might carry over from the upcoming foldable iPhone, whose inner display will only be slightly smaller, but I’m not holding my breath.
They have like 40%+ margin on hardware, even when raw mem chips quadruple in price I doubt they lose more than a few single digit percent of margin and I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to take the hit to keep their pricing the same as they always are.
Keep in mind that before the whole memory price hike crisis they were already charging ~3x what the competition charged for ssd/ram upgrades
The base model has only 128GB of storage. IMO they are pushing uses to upgrade storage more aggressively than ever. This should make up somewhat for the increased cost of volatile and non-volatile memory.
I have a 6 with cracked glass and won't buy another one until 3rd party browsers can release without webkit. The net is an awful place without uBlock, which I am reminded about every time I try to surf with the ipad...
Your answer is Vivaldi, it has a built-in ad blocker that in my few years experience works exactly the same as ubo out of the box. If it wasn't for Vivaldi, I wouldn't buy an iPad because of what you described.
I’ve been astonished at how bad the battery is in my base iPad I bought last year.
Granted I’m switching to it from an iPhone 17 pro max but still the thing goes from 100% to 80% overnight without being used and a 40 minute Zwift ride routinely drains 15-20%. Makes me much more reluctant to buy another as it has to be tethered to a charger.
I have an M3 iPad Air. I only upgraded after my M1 iPad Air 4th generation (IIRC) stopped turning off and it was way too expensive to get a replacement board.
I am desperately clinging on to these because they still use TouchID. Words cannot describe how much I hate FaceID as a person with poor vision. When I'm forced to use it on my iPhone (which is all the time), I have to move it away from my face or I get the "Try again". Super-annoying.
But it gets worse: after a certain number of unsuccessful tries, you're forced to use your passcode anyway and FaceID has false negatives ALL THE TIME.
It's even worse on n iPad form factor where the iPad often isn't facing you directly. It might be attached to a keyboard, on a stand, on your lap or on your chest (when lying down). Many of these angles just don't naturally work with FaceID.
If only Apple would give me a FaceID OPTION on an iPhone.
I haven't bought a keyboard or anything. If I wanted a device to work on in any way, I'd still use a Macbook Air. But I do love my iPad Air.
That’s nice. Now how about Apple put some engineering resources on squashing the seemingly proliferating fundamental glitches all across their OSs.
I’ve recently started experiencing a new-to-me glitch where the Safari unibar just drops the input. Apparently, it’s been a thing that’s been around for several years though. How is it a thing to drop inputs in your browser and it’s not fixed at least 9 years later?
On a related note; that’s what always concerns me the most about things like AI and robotics, the frontier is constantly pushed, in spite of the rather major, fundamental flaws and glitches … as people are pushing AI and robotics into taking over everything.
What happens when the glitch is in the do not start Ai robot nuclear war routine?
Apple’s hardware teams are seriously running laps around their software teams. Which is odd, because historically, it’s been the opposite.
Until iPad OS actually becomes capable for complex work and multitasking, I can’t see what the benefit of strapping such a powerful chip to an iPad is.
I'm still upset that they dropped the Smart Keyboard Folio. For me, that was the perfect keyboard case. I was hoping some third party would copy the design and release a new case but it never happened.
The Smart Keyboard Folio is great! I got one on clearance a few months ago and use it whenever I'm using the iPad around house/town. (If I'm travelling out of town with my iPad where I won't be able to use my desktop keyboard, I bring my Magic Keyboard instead.)
It's so good that if Apple changes the form-factor of the iPad Air, I'll probably take that opportunity to buy the last Smart Keyboard Folio-compatible iPad Air to stretch my use of it as long as possible. (Though I worry that at that point I'll wear out the internal ribbon connectors eventually.)
Somehow Woot still has a supply of the Smart Keyboard Folio for certain 11" iPads Pro/Air.
My wife is still using an older gen 11" iPad Pro and her keyboard folio stopped working (they fall apart after a few years ), so I took a gamble and ordered one. It arrived in the original, sealed packaging. As far as I can tell, it had never been opened, and it is perfect condition and works great. My wife is very happy. I bought a second one for when this one falls apart.
Has been for a while, assuming you can get work done on the iPad UI. It doesn't do a normal mouse and there are some limitations to things like screen dimensions.
Works in a pinch but Apple is not going to compete with themselves on this front, they're expecting you to buy a macbook for serious work and an iPad for work in a pinch.
Buy M-based iPad, nice monitor, keyboard and mouse. Connect mouse and keyboard to monitor via USB. Then iPad via USB-C/Thunderbolt to monitor.
Everything "just works" and you can handle surprisingly high amount of work this way
If you are using an iPad as a second screen - you get the same app you have on your mac (obviously, iPad just acts as a second screen: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102597).
If you are using an external keyboard and a mouse with it - you will get the same touch UI, yes.
Many apps are missing many keyboard shortcuts that you may be used to if you’ve used the equivalent on the desktop. You’ll need to keep the iPad screen accessible to tap on UX elements. There’s also the issue that shortcuts that do exist may be hard to discover because there’s no menu bar to look in.
> Many apps are missing many keyboard shortcuts that you may be used to
This is true. To see the ones that are available, hold down the command ⌘ key to get a scrollable list of all of the shortcuts for the app you’re currently using, and use Fn-m or globe key-m to see a list of the system shortcuts.
Had no problems connecting iPad Air 4 to external display via USB-C DP. Have not check whether periphery devices work this way though - I used BLE keyboard.
I don't understand people complaining about Apple using ~nearly latest processor on a device refresh. What are they supposed to do, not put a year old CPU inside, use something from a decade ago?
If you are on an iPad from 5 or so years ago there, or happy with your device, sure - there is no reason to upgrade. But the very same reason that you do not have to upgrade is that Apple put a fairly powerful chip in your device a while ago that is still holding today.
It should be a common sense that these devices are for first time buyers or for users of very old devices that finally end up upgrading, and why would those people not be treated with a fairly recent internals?
I doubt the gripe has ever been about putting the latest tech in it. It’s more about putting the latest tech in it and then having very little to actually do with it.
I am still waiting for iPad to support docking stations and multiple 2-3 monitors. Until then, they are not serious about productivity and making ipad a forst class product.
I had a 2008 iPad until few years ago and I think it was the most impressive device I ever owned. I couldn't believe how much performance and longevity you can get out of such a small and simple device, for the price which hasn't changed in 8 years. I sold it because I spent most of my time on a laptop, but looking at this new M4 Air iPad makes my wallet tingle. I first want to see what the low cost Macbook is like, hopefully that's tomorrow.
No side profile pics on the page. My only concern would be can it lay flat on a table for taking notes or does it have a camera bulge that makes it wobble?
I hate apple. Can't they just add a second bump on the other side? They're being a PITA with this wobble and it's been going on for like 15 years now (iPhone 7 forward)
FWIW, the iPad Air I bought a couple years ago has a small protrusion for the single camera lens, but does not wobble when laying flat and is not really noticeable. This latest iPad Air has a similar design.
Does nobody care that iPadOS lost its old Split View workflow? I would never consider another iPad until it's brought back. Their multitasking story is a total mess at the moment. Hopefully Lemay can work it into iPadOS 27
If you were utterly confused, like I was, how the iPad Air M4 compares to the iPad Pro M5 and the iPad Pro M4, this 3-column comparison table from Apple's website might help:
I have the M3 iPad Air… I won’t have to replace it for at least 4 years because it’s stupidly powerful but both of its hands are tied because of iPad OS. Apple needs to get serious and make a version of MacOS for the iPad otherwise these upgrades are meaningless for most users.
Maybe my pockets are not deep enough, but I completely fail to understand the value proposition of iPad Air vs the regular iPad. If you want something powerful or big - go with Pro, if not - choose the "regular", much cheaper.
Better chip (A series vs M series), better screen (sRGB vs antireflective fully laminated P3), more options available (1TB, 13”), little qol things like a better WiFi chip.
It’s just a nicer device for a bit more money ($349 to $599). Not everyone wants to jump all the way to $999 for the Pro.
I think the perfect combo is a powerful Mac Mini plus a portable iPad — let macOS handle the productivity work, and just use the iPad as a big-screen AI terminal.
Let me know when I can buy an M5 Max Macbook Pro that can run local open weight LLMs. Until then, nothing else is particularly interesting, everything I already own gets the job done.
I bought a regular iPad in 2017, I'm really impressed that almost 9 years later it's still working and the batter is still great (especially for reading).
I bought an iPad for the same reason ~everyone does, for media consumption. But if I could use the hardware to do more interesting things then I'd be willing to spend more on a more powerful model.
Maybe a minor thing, but the largest pro in landscape is just barely smaller than a two-page spread in a comic book, making it possibly the best way to read digital comics.
Though, I personally don’t need all the horsepower and would get lower-end iPads in that size if they existed and were cheaper.
The iPad Air and iPad Pro are both available in 11" and 13" variants. 30% savings if you want like-for-like storage, almost 40% if you can do with less.
The pro has the perfect form factor for sheet music. Absurd over kill in terms of other hardware, but there's really no alternative for musicians (other than paper).
iPad’s seem to be in some netherworld with no real purpose to them. They are not phones or laptops and so the main use case outside of consuming media at times is for conference room and reception kiosks?
I didn’t understand iPads for years. As a half engineer half email monkey, doing work on them is still next to impossible, especially with nerfed versions of Office applications.
But, they are excellent for media consumption, particularly reading and marking up PDFs. I am able to focus while reading in a way I cannot on a computer. Procreate is amazing (drawing brushes with a pressure sensitive pen and layer/mask support all in one). Great for playing Civ on a flight. And it does all those things in a comfortable form factor while being fundamentally a pleasant device to use.
All that considered, the iPad Air is not that expensive, and it will probably last you a decade before it needs replacing.
You lay not travel much where opening a 16” MacBook Pro even in economy plus is a lean back risk and typing misery situation. iPad much better for tray table things. I have the 11” just for this purpose
I don't understand why they still have such thick borders, compared to smartphone screens that almost get to the edge. Anybody knows if there's a technical reason for it?
Tablets need an edge where you can grip it. Without thicker bezels, it’s harder to hold it without your fingers being on the screen. This is much less of an issue for phone-sized devices.
- Why is grip a feature of the bare tablet and not part of a case accessory?
- Why is the grip point the flat glass front of the display, instead of anything more ergonomic for actually holding it?
Phones don't do this, not even 7" phablets, nor for holding them horizontally, nor holding them with two hands gamepad-style during gameply. Why do tablets?
Because most tablets are intended to be as thin and compact as possible while being too large to wrap a hand around. Imagine the complaints if Apple told people to buy a case so they could hold the product. Imagine putting a ledge on one side to hold it oh hey, it's a Kindle Scribe (and still ALSO has a bigger bezel than the iPad Pro.)
I think it's an ergonomic issue. Phones (even the Pro Max size) can be held with one hand or two hands without resting your palm or pinching the edge to hold it. You could but it could cause some erratic behavior.
A tablet though doesn't hold well when just pressing on the sides. So having some place to grab and rest your palm is more necessary here. They probably could go thinner with borders but it's a balancing act of usability and aesthetics. Also have things like the camera to account for and on tablets you don't have to make a punch-hole or teardrop. The iPad Pro's also package in FaceID cameras so it could be a product consistency choice too.
I don't think it is technical. Because of their size, they would be hard to hold without covering portions of the screen, if the bezels were thinner. As is, my fat fingers get in the way already.
To each their own, but I would rather have a larger border where I can rest my thumb without causing an accidental press/scroll a few times a day. The software-based rejection is not good enough and I am very willing to go back to the older look of the iPad if offered.
People take tons of photos and videos on their phones. Download 40 GB of music and podcasts on Spotify. Keep 50 GB of videos in their messages. All at once.
iPads usually aren't used as much for these things. They're used for browsing, streaming, gaming, reading... mostly things that don't take up nearly as much space.
It's not spite, just matching device capabilities to user needs without unnecessary upgrades that will lead to a higher price point.
I use tons of storage on my phone. Not much on my iPad. Pretty much just downloading TV shows before a flight, but 128 GB gives you plenty of hours of that.
I'd hazard a guess that people use significantly less storage on iPads than their phones. Phones get filled with photos and videos, whereas people use iPads primarily to browse social media and stream videos.
I have an iPhone and an iPad Pro, and I use far less local storage on my iPad than I do on my phone. I know it sounds counter intuitive. I wouldn’t be surprised that this is the norm.
I still have the 2017 pro and i can't imagine a good enough reason to buy almost 10 years later a new gen. And i'm the guy who loves buying new stuff without need. It's a dumb consumer device with the hardware of a pro device but you can't use it as a pro device. So what's the point of upgrading? Watching Youtube with 10x more powerful hardware than 2017? Really?
I still don't get what they're for. Most people I know end up in the same situation as me, buying one thinking you'll use it mostly as a writing device but then either it ends up in a closet or just a web browser you use while sitting on the couch watching TV. In that case what does any of the improvements matter?
With first party native apps it's not great for writing, editing pdfs, nor drawing. I mean the notes app doesn't even have simple things like letting you zoom in. You'd think a common use case would be to use it as a drawing tablet for your computer? Maybe not a common use case but I think something a lot of people would end up using a few times a year (countless times I'd love to have a whiteboard on a zoom call but setting that up is annoying)
There's great third party apps to do this but I think it just shows that either Apple is disconnected or just trying to get money from developers.
It's also not great as a computer. I mean in another thread I've mentioned my laptop (macbook air) is a glorified ssh machine and frankly, an iPad should the perfect device for that because its size. But it seems they don't want me to use it like a computer and idk why iOS locks down third party terminals so much.
It also sucks as a second monitor (why is everything monitor related so bad with Apple?). Keeps disconnecting, I need to restart Bluetooth/airdrop constantly to detect it, and the angle it sits at when sitting on my desk... really?
I really want to know what you guys use it for because mine just really feels like expensive ewaste.
The iPad mini is great for reading books (what I bought it for) and if you don't have an iPhone, any other iOS apps you want to run. I also use Chrome a lot for general web browsing.
Also. I inherited an older, full size iPad that I plan to leave on my piano for sheet music.
For reading I've honestly found e-ink way better. Not just on the eyes (neither blinded at night nor makes me squint if I'm outside or by a window) but the UI. The iPad gets the job done but it just feels like Apple doesn't want people to be using it that way and god Fitbit if you do something the non-Apple way.
For browsing the web, yeah I think my comment reflects that experience. But I won't go to places like HN because typing is just a shitshow on iOS. Don't get me started on swipe... and how is it 2026 and there isn't a universal gesture for back?
Idk, anyone with a remarkable browse the web? How is it? I'd get one in a heartbeat but that price is outrageous
Have owned a couple iPads starting ~2010 -- mainly for reading pdfs, and comics in electronic form. Occasionally drawing / jamming some tunes - almost all via 3rd party apps. There are still plenty of decent apps in the ecosystem, even though their eventual obsolescence is as good as built in, and a lot of stuff I previously loved the platform for has now been gone for years with no replacement. Native apps have never been great at pretty much anything, with a notable exception of Garage Band which is an absolute banger for its money. Books is... passable I guess?
But the reading pdfs part is important -- and really hard to beat for me, the iOS drag/scroll/pinch/zoom UX perceived responsiveness is still unmatched IMO. It would take some real creativity beyond liquid glass to enshittify this aspect out.
I find the last part really surprising. That seems, and feels (I do have an iPad), standard to me. But markup is, to put it lightly, fucking terrible.
I lean towards the iPad's success mostly being brand name and advertising because I've never experienced the "just works". I understand that from the non techie people, but not when talking to nerds
What are you talking about? Air literally always meant thin and light. Now they're treating it a premium product between normal and pro instead (see iPhone Air too)
Yeah they should never have tried to copy "Air" from MacBooks, precisely where it meant thinnest/lightest, to the iPad/iPhone line where the products are already thin and light. That has always seemed like a bizarre branding move to me.
If they need a mid-tier brand between entry-level and Pro, just call it Plus. The iPad Plus would make a lot more sense.
I don't understand the target audience of ipad air.
The base ipad is "really big iphone, with a few laptop-esque features". It's reasonably cheap for what it offers, especially if you want a highly mobile media consumption device and handwritten input.
Then there's ipad pro, which is wildly overpriced for its specs -- m4 pro has half!! the ram that the cheaper m4 macbook air has, which is laughable for a 'pro' anything, especially if you have apple intelligence enabled - you get what, 3GB of usable ram once you take OS and apple intelligence into account? Yet, aside from the crazy sticker price, the hardware is a lot better - the 120 Hz OLED display looks amazing and is way brighter, the speakers are quite an upgrage, full blown thunderbolt port for external display and so on. The OS is still toy-like, and ram is pitiful, but there is place for an ipad pro.
And then there's air which is... base ipad with an M-series chip and pretty much nothing else? The display is barely any better than base ipad, the storage and ram are pitiful, the speakers are from the baseline ipad and so on. Just about the only saving grace of the M4 one announced here is 12GB ram, which is the absolute lowest those really ought to have, and really puts into perspective how utterly miserly Apple was about ram pre-AI. I don't understand the value proposition - you want the baseline you buy a much cheaper base model, you want more you get the pro, right?
To be fair the asking price is far less than pro but the upgrades over base model seem so minuscule that I just don't know.
Larger screen option, much better screen, better pencil support - not better support, but a much better pencil (this is HUGE for my daughter for example).
It's crazy to me that someone can look at a $350 device and a $1000 device and say there's not room for something in the middle...
I live in Asia and I see all students using iPads instead of laptops. The limitations of the OS are really not felt by the general public. Whatever you listed doesn't even make sense to them, they buy things based on what they can afford. Every iPad works the same to them.
You're not wrong, but I hate the idea of an entire generation growing up without ever using a full powered computer. (Full powered is the wrong word, more like fully capable computer)
We have an entire generation who only knows how to interact with "usability optimized" interfaces with zero friction and zero learning curve.
Not knowing how to use a regular computer creates a barrier to entry for programming and other computing industries that didn’t exist before.
I get it, there's now definitely a hurdle between "I got a computing device" and "I can program on it". I don’t think it's a huge hurdle though, you can and will be able to upgrade or just buy a full computer when and if you encounter its limitations.
Your car can't compete in races, but it doesn't affect you because you're probably not interested in racing. You're more interested in comfort and price.
Driving a manual isn’t a required life experience by any means. But the overwhelming majority of people who know how to drive manual appreciate the knowledge and experience. (And it’s not necessarily more expensive, if anything Apple products are typically more expensive)
To me, the tablet form factor is dead with the arrival of the trifold.
90% of the people who use tablets I know (including myself) only has four use case: watching video, reading PDF and comics, taking notes, and playing mobile games.
All of which are very mobile-oriented tasks that are done on tablets solely for their screen sizes. With trifold bridging the gap between screen sizes and, more importantly, screen ratios, I would love to merge them into one device. This is in contrast with laptops, whose differences in OS and use cases are, to me, much bigger and necessary.
Of course, right now they are very much afar from consumers' pockets due to price and reliability. But normal foldables were once in the exact same state, and the fact that Apple is releasing one soon is a sure tale sign of the future of foldables.
I have a hard time justifying buying a trifold when my 13-inch iPad Pro was 1263€ and the Samsung trifold is probably gonna be closer to 3000€ for a 10-inch display. If I assume that it'll be 2999€, you can get a 13-inch iPad Pro (1519€), a Magic Keyboard for the iPad (399€), an iPhone 17 (999€) and still have money left over. And this is straight from Apple.com. It's possible to get better deals elsewhere.
A properly built tablet OS UI would also have those differences in the OS that make it more than just a larger phone screen, which so far seems to be most of what the foldables are doing with a gimmick thrown in here or there.
iPadOS may not fully be to the point of being an OS UI that really utilizes the benefits of a tablet sized device, but it does have elements that are unique to it that would not really make sense on a phone.
That being said, if your tablet use case really is just a larger phone than a foldable would be great. But i know for myself the way I use my iPad it would not be a suitable replacement. Especially not now, maybe in 5+ years once someone figures out how to make an OS that actually manages different ways of interacting with it in different form factors work, but that has yet to happen.
I wouldn’t put too much hope into foldables, at least not because of Apple’s involvement. They also released the Vision Pro. And there’s still the unsolved(?) problem of the screens getting easily scratched/destroyed if they’re not heavily protected and kept clean. (There are some informative teardown videos, e.g. by JerryRigEverything.)
Dunno if Apple's foldable will support Apple Pencil. (For that matter, not sure a touchscreen MacBook would either.) That's one use case for a properly rigid, solid, flat surface.
The iPad would go from a never-buy to a buy-right-away for me, if they added user profiles. It'd be a nice thing to have on your coffee table, where anyone in the household can pick it up and be logged into all of their stuff.
Windows XP had this feature. Chromebooks have this feature. It's inexcusable that such an expensive gadget can only have one user.
Tim Cook's fear of people not buying a full set of Apple devices for each person is the driving force behind not just the lack of multiuser support, but also the overall nerfing of iPadOS.
For the past 5+ years it's been, "This will be the year of real work on the iPad," but they keep circling around it, trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook.
The flip side here is if I could use an iPad to replace the MacMini on my desk and connect to a monitor with the same support my Mac does I'd most likely have a top end iPad Pro as opposed to my mildly spec'd MacMini M2 and iPad Air M1. I'd literally spend MORE money on that 1 iPad than both existing iPad and Macs I have today.
Same. Plus with multi-user, I would own multiple size iPads since they instantly become more useful as shared family devices, rather than only being tied to one persons iCloud/messages/email. And more importantly for our old boy Tim - they would be larger storage sizes because they would be logged into multiple users.
Multiuser is already baked in iOS-adjacent operating systems. tvOS offers user profiles on power on.
Perhaps someone who's more versed in Apple tech can weigh in, but my limited understanding is that tvOS' users are mostly an illusion - the current user is just a flag exposed to running apps, and each app decides on its own what (if anything) they do with that information. There's no system-level separation of data or permissions for different users.
(In my experience, most non-Apple apps just seem to ignore user profiles on the Apple TV, and either behave as single-user apps, or have their own totally unrelated user profiles.)
Yeah. For example, the same Netflix account is used even if you switch tvOS profiles.
Yeah, I think that's a assumption Apple made that most AppleTV devices would be in the same household where people can simply use the streaming app's ability to switch profiles. That sucks if you have roommates that pay for their own streaming subscriptions or the AppleTV device is in a common area such a dormitory. I suppose they could solve this by allowing ad-hoc profiles if AppleTV and user's IOS device is on the same network.
The user profile stuff as far as I can tell literally just determines the recently watched data in the Apple TV app. It doesn't even use your iCloud account when you select your account - I attempted to show some photos from my photo library on an Apple TV set up by someone else the other day and it just wanted to pop up their photos instead.
I’m pretty sure iPadOS supports multiple profiles on Classroom[0] devices.
[0]: https://www.apple.com/education/k12/teaching-tools/
Yeah, it’s like TVOS. One main account determines apps installed etc (WiFi settings, etc). Then local docs switches per user.
Honestly that good enough for home use.
You must be a school or business with DUNS number and rigorous, manual verification through Apple to set up shared iPads with managed Apple IDs in the School or Business Manager Portal.
Yes, but you see it's even more profitable if apple can convince you to buy both. They can't allow you to not buy both because that will make shareholders sad
I wonder if something like that is in the works, given touch screen capability coming to Macs, and Tahoe being geared for touch UX...
I mean we can always wish but I think Thi’s has been the major gripe for a number of years. They could run macOS today in an iPad. Alternatively they could at the very least copy some of the basic workflows in iOS but it’s just different enough that even with a keyboard the iPad feels off compared to a Mac.
> ...but they keep circling around it, trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook.
Kinda ironic for a company when it was Jobs who said"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will"...
I have an ageing iPad, but the crap software really makes me reconsider ever wanting to spend so much money for a shiny toy.
> trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook.
TBH, if you buy an iPad and their nice keyboard case, it costs almost as much as an MBA. This is one of the reasons I simply cannot justify getting a new iPad these days. The other is that my 8 year old iPad Pro still works just fine, in case I ever need to do iPad-ish things like draw with the pencil.
$270-$300 (used to be $350?) for the iPad keyboard. I feel like Apple did a good job targeting a user segment that is just happy to spend extra money on gadgets, aside from whoever really needs this laptop-tablet in-between.
Yeah I feel lucky to have picked one up for $199 back in the day. Still use it, though TBH it's mostly as a second monitor for my MBA, when I'm traveling. I don't work on the iPad itself that much, even though the keyboard is delightful.
By a wacom bamboo, costs next to nothing and works without charging the stylus. Of course if you are using it on the go it’s inconvenient.
> TBH, if you buy an iPad and their nice keyboard case, it costs almost as much as an MBA.
Right. Which, by my calculations, means it costs half as much as an MBA plus an iPad and their nice keyboard case.
Don't know how much either the iPad or the nice keyboard case cost by themselves, but probably more than 0. So even skipping the nice keyboard case and buying just a naked iPad in addition to the MBA still makes Apple more money.
Why would they forgo this if they're indeed the mustache-twirling capitalists like everyone says?
> they keep circling around it, trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook.
Which is really silly, because if someone needs to do actual work they are not going to do it on an iPad no matter how capable it is. The form factor simply does not work for getting work done. Apple has nothing to fear here.
>Which is really silly, because if someone needs to do actual work they are not going to do it on an iPad no matter how capable it is. The form factor simply does not work for getting work done.*
Nonsens. The iPad is basically a 11 to 13 (Pro) monitor+computer with an amazing touch screen. Adding the official keyboard folio, or any bluetooth keyboard/mourse is trivial, and it makes for an excellent on-the-go machine. Not different to the 12-inch MacBook (circa 2015) and the older fan favorite 12-inch PowerBook G4 (circa 2003), and I know several devs who swore by them. Linus used and loved one of the latter (with PPC Linux on in his case).
The only issue is the lack of OS level support for some stuff, not the form factor.
Admins, devs working mostly on the Cloud, photographers, and writers already use it for "getting work done", I've seen execs too.
This is the form factor I want in an iPad (full computer):
https://www.sotsu.com/products/flipaction-elite-16?variant=4...
Just let me use my own keyboard/mouse when I want to use it like a computer. Better ergonomics too as the iPad would be at a good height.
>Just let me use my own keyboard/mouse
Isn't that already possible if you plugin a keyboard/mouse via a USB-C dongle/hub?
Yes, but I want it to act like a regular iPad when I’m not plugged in.
* I have 2 Sotsu Elites for my travel setup.
My monitor has a powered USB-C port and USB hub built into it. It's one cable to dock a laptop, it's pretty cool.
If I could plug my iPad into that cable to use it as a Mac I would do that all the time and buy a more powerful iPad. It would be an iPad for idle browsing and a Mac for the times I need a real computer.
You almost can. With Stage Manager enabled, an iPad plugged into a Studio Display is shockingly Mac-like. You get a menubar, windows that resize, a mouse pointer, etc. I could easily convince someone that they were on a Mac if I hid the iPad.
I don't like Stage Manager at all in undocked mode, though. I wish it would just turn on when the iPad was docked, and turn off otherwise.
I don’t see any reason you couldn’t. iOS supports all of the standard USB C protocols.
Presumably because you can't use the "advanced" apps which you can use on an actual mac?
Because it's not a Mac even though the chipset is the same, there's no XCode and whatnot.
As a Windows user who had several MS Surface tablets I fully agree that the form factor would make it a very suitable on-the-go device.
the form factor is a problem. Have you ACTUALLY tried using an ipad as a laptop for more than a few minutes? It is top-heavy and falls over all the time. Even if you solve that problem, you now have multiple devices that you must keep charged and with you at all time.
At that point, an actual laptop is simpler.
That form factor exists on the windows side for about a decade now, so yes people do actually use it day to day for their work.
It's easy to forget that many laptops are used 99% plugged to a hub and an external monitor. I have a keyboard and mouse I like a lot, and having a tablet floating on an arm next to my other screen instead of half open clam with a useless keyboard pointing at me is incredibly freeing.
Even on the go, bringing a bluetooth (trackpoint II）keyboard is just better overall IMHO. It's up to people's taste, but tablet form factors are not some unsolved mistery. Commercial success would of course be another discussion.
Tablets will need to become a great deal lighter than they currently are before the awkwardness you describe will dissipate. Maybe after some kind of breakthrough in battery tech that allows for a much lighter and thinner battery?
Until then, I would agree that the old 12" MacBook still has a big leg up over an iPad + keyboard due to its clamshell form factor. It's so much less fussy for any use case where a keyboard matters.
I've seen people use their (non-Apple) tablet in the kitchen for recipes. Can't imagine taking my laptop to the kitchen.
I have a kickstand case with a magnetic Bluetooth keyboard and integrated 3rd party pen holder and it works just like a laptop but supports the pen, plus I can leave the keyboard behind and prop it on my treadmill to watch movies, etc. It's actually a lot more convenient than a laptop in a lot of circumstances.
>Have you ACTUALLY tried using an ipad as a laptop for more than a few minutes? It is top-heavy and falls over all the time.
Not even sure what you mean. Get a keyboard stand or a regular stand + keyboard. Never "falls over" for me.
Do you try to balance it on its side or something?
You know you can use a standard Bluetooth and keyboard and mouse with an iPad? My wife uses her 13 inch iPad for everything - mostly Zoom, Office, everything web based, and “consumption”. I have an M2 MacBook Air that I bought in 2023 for a side project I was doing when I was in between jobs. I haven’t opened it since. I do the little bit of stuff I do outside of work on my iPad Air 3.
I've just never understood this. A 13" MacBook Air would accomplish everything better for me. A laptop has a stand for the screen built into it and it's much more stable on any surface vs a tablet case + stand.
Sure, it's easier to use a tablet while standing, but that's what I use my phone for, and it's always with me in my pocket. If I'm going to carry a 13" tablet around it might as well be a laptop which is thinner and lighter than a tablet + keyboard case.
Then there is always something annoying that I can't do on an iPad so I have to grab a real computer to do it.
I tried using iPads many times over the years but ended up selling them because a laptop + smartphone does everything I need better.
You stated "You know you can use a standard Bluetooth and keyboard and mouse with an iPad? My wife uses her 13 inch iPad for everything - mostly Zoom, Office, everything web based"
In my opinion all of that works better on a laptop. I don't use any streaming services so that functionality is not important for me, but I do recognize that may be important for some.
For me carrying a tablet + laptop while traveling would just be wasted space when I can and prefer to do everything on the laptop anyways.
My wife spends a lot more time in consumption mode and rarely uses it as a “productivity device”
And you can’t download movies from streaming services on a laptop and I have unlimited cellular data on our laptops for $25 a month. When I say we travel a lot - I mean we were on a plane going somewhere over a dozen times last year and this year we are spending a month and half doing the digital nomad thing in another country right now and we will be doing one way trips across 4 cities for two months this summer.
And you don’t need a keyboard or mouse for Zoom.
Yeah but the cheapest iPad only costs $300. Not all of us can afford a MacBook Air. Not to mention I found a case which has a kickstand feature + magnetic BT keyboard + pen to make it work like a laptop + added pen functionality ($60 for all of those 3rd party accessories).
So you don’t understand why someone who doesn’t need a computer most of the time might rather have an iPad?
Besides, you can’t get a MacBook with cellular and you can’t download movies to use offline with most streaming services on a Mac since most of them don’t have Mac apps.
We travel a lot. Even I take my laptop + iPad + external USB powered/USB video display that works with one USB cable. Most of the time I just use my external display. But I can use my iPad as a third display.
I really use my personal laptop for nothing. I left it at home while we are spending a month and a half in another country. When I get off work, I don’t think about using my computer for anything - I don’t do side projects and haven’t for 30 years.
Cue my old manager SSH’ing into work machines while on his boat from his iPad - it does happen. Not saying that working on it is the norm by any means, but it’s about on par with “my android phone is logged in to my tmux session on the dev server and I’m cowboy coding from the bar”
I haven't seen one yet, but theoretically a case that secures the tablet in a holder that has a proper hinge (instead of the typical kickstand style) attached would work. You'd have to weight the keyboard a bit but there's no reason it wouldn't work, and effectively give you the exact same form factor as a laptop.
That sounds like the existing Magic Keyboard for the current iPad airs and pros, can you explain the difference a bit more?
i bought a magic keyboard for my 11" ipad pro and ultimately didn't use it much. it does have a traditional laptop-style hinge, but the way the ipad mounts to the case brings it forward over the keyboard more than with a regular laptop. the hinge also doesn't allow for a very wide range of motion (even compared to macbooks). finally, the center of gravity is really high compared to a laptop which makes it awkward to use as a literal laptop or when lying down.
it definitely looks cool (i could see the design having been inspired by the OG Mac and 20th Anniversary Mac) but works best on a stable surface; plus if you want to use it purely as a tablet, you're left with a big clunky keyboard case to deal with.
the idea of a laptop/tablet combo is cool but i haven't seen the concept executed very successfully from either starting point.
the point of that hinge, besides weight distribution, is to make it easy to reach and touch the bottom of the screen, and so that it's not fully perpendicular to your finger.
and that particular subproblem of using a tablet as a notebook - it solves it well! but it's still a little weird when you try to use it like a laptop. maybe this is a cop-out but it definitely feels like a product that would not have passed the Jobs test in its current form.
I think they just don't know about the Magic Keyboard.
You would be correct. If the ipad let you use full osx it would be pretty attractive to me and I probably would have spent the 5 minutes needed to discover the magic keyboard, but unfortunately the idea of buying a computing device with such insanely powerful hardware but being locked into standard tablet UX really doesn't excite me.
I would absolutely carry an iPad Pro with a dev environment with me on the holidays for emergencies instead of macbook. And I could add a cheap keyboard, mouse, and connect it to TV to get good enough work environment. Or connect it to dock at home, just like I do with the macbook.
Any time I think about doing this, I remind myself of the news story[0] about the iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard being heavier than a MacBook Air. I believe it was thicker as well.
I’m not sure if it’s still the case, as they trimmed down the iPad Pro quite a bit, but I don’t think the iPad is that much of a boon for travel. For the size and weight, it seems moot. I’d rather have the keyboard and trackpad of a proper MacBook, full macOS, and a system that won’t fall apart. The last time I took an iPad on a plane, the person in front of me reclined, hit the iPad, and it flew off the magnetic keyboard and I had to fish around for it on the floor. Thankfully it didn’t break.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/20/21227741/apple-ipad-pro-m...
But why? A 13" MacBook Air is smaller and lighter than carrying a tablet + keyboard + mouse. And iOS is always going to be more difficult to do real work on vs MacOS.
> But why? A 13" MacBook Air is smaller and lighter than carrying a tablet + keyboard + mouse.
Because portability isn’t just about weight?
There are plenty of situations where a tablet for many will be more usable than a laptop. Cramped spaces, on a plane, laying back on a couch, standing, quick pull-outs in public, or maybe when they want something that feels more personal rather than “I’m working now.” That last one is a big one. A LOT of IT people I know have moved to tablets for their personal machines because they want to be as far away as possible from anything their brain can connect to work.
Given OP specifically said “for emergencies” and “good enough,” that suggests to me they are looking for flexibility, not maximum capability, largely an area in which the modern tablet for a not insignificant number of people, excels.
> And iOS is always going to be more difficult to do real work on vs MacOS.
If your workflow depends on native macOS software, then sure, maybe. But for people whose work is browser based, cloud based, or remote (SSH, RDP, SaaS tools), iOS is perfectly viable. I know people running entire businesses from iPads and its not just viable, they prefer it, they don't even own computing devices outside of iOS/Android.
Personally, I don’t use an iPad for work, but realistically, I could. SSH exists, and most of what I use lives in a browser anyway.
Why? My wife and travel a lot and we spend extended periods of time away from home. I can’t imagine wanting to work from just an iPad. My travel and home setup is a Roost laptop stand, an Apple BT keyboard and mouse and a portable USB C monitor with a stand
Portable Monitor, InnoView 15.8... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B095GG31KX?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_shar...
Metal Tablet Stand, a Portable... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4KH2GH3?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_shar...
I have an iPad Air 3rd gen and my wife has a 13 inch iPad Air that she uses exclusively
My dad and my brother use ipad pros for their healthcare business and rarely use laptops. For them, the year of real work happened several years ago. My brother even has a mouse for it somehow.
What's the "somehow" about the mouse? They've supported that for a while now.
I believe it, but it's not something I've ever see in the wild. I have seen people using a trackpad in a keyboard folio, though.
Exactly - any USB mouse via the USB-C connector (or lightning camera adapter before that) works. External displays also work via USB-C.
Yeah they should even just let you install macOS if you want, they’d probably sell a lot of overpriced storage at a minimum and people still wouldn’t use them for real work…
Didn’t Apple themselves at some point release an ad with a teenager using an iPad going “what’s a computer”?
They’re pretty aware they’d be cannibalizing their lower-end laptop lineup.
That’s their goal (or it used to be). When the iPad was first released the idea was that the iPad would be all 80% of people needed.
The metaphor of cars vs trucks was used. For heavy duty work, trucks (Macs) will always be around. For everyone else, a car (iPad) will do just fine.
When the iPad nano was released they killed off the best selling iPad, the mini. Their statement on this was that they want to be the one to cannibalize their own products. If they don’t do it someone else will. Look at the iPhone, it made the iPod obsolete. Had they missed the boat on smartphones like Microsoft, they’d be screwed, as the iPod was half the business. Instead, they make way more on iPhones than they ever did on iPods. iPhone replaced the iPod sales and then some.
> When the iPad nano was released they killed off the best selling iPad, the mini.
Did you mean the iPod? :)
Yes. I want to blame auto-correct, but “o” and “a” are so far apart that I’m just not sure. Of course I’ve had modern iOS autocorrect do much worse, because it does what it thinks instead of what I type.
And especially more silly, since they'll soon launch a cheap A-series chipped MacBook. Why can I have multiple users on a $700 MacBook, but not a $1500 iPad Pro?
> Which is really silly, because if someone needs to do actual work they are not going to do it on an iPad no matter how capable it is. The form factor simply does not work for getting work done.
I know plenty of people who in fact have moved to an iPad as a primary computing device, including for work/business. Including a handful of engineering leaders using remote-code solutions.
I can tell you aren’t optimizing for illustration or 3D drafting. It’s absolutely amazing.
Bean Counter Tim is going to drive Apple into the ground before he does anything useful. Just look at the current state of the ecosystem when it comes to UI/UX and software stability.
I mainly use my iPad Pro like a MacBook with the Magic Keyboard and a Razer mouse (I can even play ARC Raiders perfectly on it, streamed from the gaming pc in another room; having a completely silent gaming setup in the living room is amazing) connected.
My macOS muscle memory works most of the time, but there are also quite some details which are slightly different or missing. If they would allow a macOS “mode” on iPad I would choose it over a MacBook instantly for work.
I’ve been experimenting with a 13” iPad Pro and Mac mini, setup with Tailscale. I love it, minus the general issues you run into with Remote Desktop. That plus not being able to deploy apps unless I’m on the same wifi (as an iOS developer.)
A dual boot iPad would be killer. I would go out and by the maxed out M5 if it was possible. MacOS for workdays, and iPadOS for everything else. That or just finish the last mile of iPadOS (Add terminal access, long running processes, lower level file system access, actual developer tooling.)
Remote Desktop is another nerfed thing. Windows is sending around window positions and UI primitives, while Mac still streams terribly compressed and lagging video of desktop, unable to even adapt resolution to client.
Fwiw, Modern Windows is mostly DWM, and doesn't get the benefit of using GDI primatives for any serious work, so it's also "just" sending compressed video streams. These days it's basically all H.264/5 thanks to GPUs taking over.
Do you mount it on a stand? my neck hurts just thinking about going through a full workday on an ipad.
I’m using the iPad Magic Keyboard which is also a stand. So it’s pretty much the same as using a MacBook. I do have the 13 inch. I tried the 11 inch but personally I found that too small to use comfortably like this.
Makes sense, in my head an iPad is 11”, I don’t think I ever saw the 13” version IRL.
I bought M1 pro ipad that ended up being on a windowsill in kitchen as a youtube tv or a again a youtube viewport while rowing, lol. What a waste, but I cannot find a better use for it. User interface also sucks, half the time i have to ask chatgpt to extricate me from some accidental split screen or what not. Kicker is that it needs to be charged almost daily while it is really only used about 30-45 min a day in the morning while my kids m4 air can go for a week.
Cue Steve Jobs keynote slide about 1st gen iPad lasting 30 days in standby.
To be fair, back when it was released it did do that. I didn’t use my iPad often in 2010, but it held onto its charge extremely well. Almost no loss while sitting idle.
I think all the push notification, cloud syncing, and everything else in the background are what kill it now.
As someone who very occasionally used my iPad, I think this may be the root cause of why I gave up on it and no longer own one. I didn’t use it a lot, so the battery was always dead when I went to pick it up. This wasn’t a problem with the first gen.
I’ve accepted that I need to charge my phone daily. I will not charge something like an iPad or laptop daily. If I’m not using it on battery for 8+ hours per day, there should be no reason it can’t hold a charge. There should be a proper sleep mode, instead of just turning off the display like on a phone. I always find it awkward and frustrating when an iPad is getting a bunch of notifications, waking up the screen, every few minutes while no one is even near it and those notifications are also going to the person’s phone.
I feel the same way about the Apple Pencil. I would have used it more if they used Wacom-style tech that didn’t require the stylus be charged. Then it could simply be picked up and used… like a pencil. I don’t know what the Apple Pencil’s excuse is for not being able to hold a charge.
They spend plenty of time adding "pro" features and apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, which they wouldn't do unless they wanted people to use them.
I'm willing to bet it's as simple as that no Apple SWEs or anyone who has to edit video or sound uses an ipad for work. As soon as Apple forced some to use one, they'd fix all of the UI problems that make them a nightmare.
Yeah, everyone I know who owns an iPad for personal use, they also own a laptop. It's possible they use the iPad more than the laptop, but they still need the laptop, which might be a Mac.
I have an iPad and a desktop Mac, no laptop. I like that the more serious stuff stays in one room.
I could excuse it if the iPad was a $200 novelty like the Amazon Fire tablets, but they're putting M-series chips in them and marketing (and pricing) them like PC replacements.
They _are already_ PC replacements for many of the people who buy them.
I just picked up a new iPad with A16 chip for roughly $300 - sure they aren't M-series level but it's plenty fast for all of my day-to-day tasks, with good battery life and 3rd party keyboard/case/pen for another $60 and it functions like a laptop when I need a laptop.
The huge advantage for some people: you can get a cellular data connection for an iPad.
If you need internet connectivity on the road regardless if Wi-Fi is available, only the iPad has that option.
Yes, you can use a Mac laptop with your phone acting as a hotspot but unless you have unlimited data, that gets expensive real fast.
Now that Apple makes their own cellular modems, it should be feasible to add them to MacBooks in the near future.
> Yes, you can use a Mac laptop with your phone acting as a hotspot but unless you have unlimited data, that gets expensive real fast.
And why exactly is that different from having the cellular connection on iPad? You can have the exact same data plan on your phone that you use as hotspot.
I'm not really in this boat (don't have an ipad, no use for it) but if I did, it would actually cost me more to have a SIM in it than just share the internet from my phone. Having a second SIM for my plan would cost me 2€ / moth extra, with no other benefit: internet usage by that 2nd SIM would be deducted from my plan, which would remain otherwise the same.
Why is it getting expensive when using the phone as a hotspot, but not when using the iPad or MacBook directly with cellular data?
I think some (most?) carriers in the US charge for hotspot traffic separately from direct access from the phone (by looking at packet's TTL, it's lower by 1)
Mmm the Freedom of US Enterprise strikes again. Such a stupid billing rule.
Even in that case, there are tethering apps that can bypass this issue.
I’ve always found this funny because everyone in my family has an iPad and none of us have a Mac.
Working as intended. Even the way you framed it. Every family member has a separate physically distinct iPad, paid for separately. It's never considered that two people might be able to use the same hardware, which is the question here.
We each have our own car too. Hard to share the things people use at the same time.
> Hard to share the things people use at the same time.
Yes, but if it's your goal to have fewer cars, then you'd make an effort not to need to use it at the same time. If that's not what you're trying to do, fine. My wife and I share a car. It's slightly inconvenient sometimes, but really not bad at all. For our particular life anyway.
So here we're talking about iPads. Some families need multiple devices for various reasons. Some don't except for the fact that iPads don't support accounts. No one's saying you would have to use them. But you're not allowed to.
1 car for our family of four seems to work fine for us in the city. Hard to imagine people with different living situations.
I held off a while on giving my youngest child his own iPad because he and his brother were playing nicely together on one more often than not. It turned iPad time into social play-together time.
Wait until your kids are older.
If they are European, they learn to get by with public transport, bikes and such.
I was already on my thirties when I got my first car.
At which point (9+) they can ride their bikes or take the bus.
What's the point here? Then you'll need another car?
Remember, we're comparing to iPads. Apple intentionally hobbles them to induce demand for multiple iPads. This isn't a question of being allowed to own multiple iPads/cars. It's a question of being artificially prevented from owning a single one.
The point isn't that you have to commit to being a single-car household for life. It's that at some points in time, you can be.
> Hard to share the things people use at the same time.
How many TVs do you have in your living area?
TVs are traditionally a shared experience. But even still, I have 2 TVs for every person in my household.
I’m 51 and I can’t remember ever going to a house with only one TV. Even my grandparents had multiple TVs and I definitely had one in my room since I was 4.
A quick Google search says that 50% of households had more than one TV in 1980.
I don't think I've ever lived in a house with more than one TV, except possibly when a college room mate kept one in their room.
I now live in a household of four, and these TV stats are blowing my mind.
https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2009/more-than-half-the-hom...
Same. I grew up in the 80's and we always had at least 2 TVs for a family of four. My sister and I both had small TVs in our bedroom once we were teens, so that was one TV per person at that point! To be fair, they were mostly used for video games...
Are you being sarcastic? Why would anyone need 2 TVs, much less every person in the house?
I'm not being sarcastic. And I really don't think my household is that far above average. We have three "living room" type areas. One in each bedroom. One in my office. One in my wife's office. I'd wager the American average is >1 per person in the house.
Edit: Looks like there is some research to suggest that Number of TVs > Number of People in Household. 2.93 TVs to 2.54 people. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/more-tv-sets-2-93-than-people...
Before we downsized to a 2 bedroom condo (where we do have 3), we had 6 in our house - our bedroom, son’s bedroom, home gym, living room, wife’s room and guest bedroom.
How many phones do you have per person?
I don't understand how a trillion dollar company can't at this point say "you know what, I think we're good on the profit front, let's convert some of that into improving UX"
Bloodsuckers say “we’re good, let’s do something beneficial for the world”, hear how that sounds?
Its not in their DNA, the don't get that large by making that kind of decisions.
If only any of their former leaders and one of the most famous people ever had said something like "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will"...
Well maybe that kind of company would've been aggressive about always being competitive, yeah? Instead of whatever Tim Cook is doing...
> trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook.
This clearly isn’t the case—the iPad Pro got the M4 processor in May 2024; the Mac didn’t get the M4 until October. So for a few months, Apple’s most powerful chip was only available for the iPad Pro.
And while the M5 MacBook Pro and the M5 iPad Pro were announced together in October 2025, none of the other Mac models have been updated to the M5.
It’s possible more M5 Macs will be announced this week; we’ll see.
I don’t think it matters to Apple whether you spend $1,000+ for an iPad or for a MacBook.
> iPads powerful enough to skip a MacBook
This is about software
I may be an outlier, but multi-user support might make me buy more iPads. Basically, an iPad Air for each major room in the house. Then my wife and I, plus guests, could pick up which ever one is closest.
Today, we just have on each and have to run around the house whenever we want it.
I think if people had a use case for it they’d buy more of the damn things. Right now I’d never need a device separate from my spouse since I just don’t need one.
Make is useful and buyers will come. The never had issues selling multiple macs frankly.
Playing devil’s advocate the only real device I truly would want to have multi user switching is the Vision Pro due to cost and features . If multiple users were to be added to the iPad would there be enough people to justify the long term use of the device ? I feel like this is a HN filter bubble desire just like small phones .
I think people want multi-user because most people still need their laptops for work (or hobbies sometimes). Otherwise, I'd be on my phone (for casual messaging, media consumption). iPad is mostly just sitting around most of time, so it can be quite easily shared b/w people in same household.
Personally it'd be for a kid's profile. I feel like that'd be a usecase for many.
I feel like you're wrong about this and small phones. Perhaps you're the one in an "everyone on HN must be in a bubble" bubble.
Small phones are definitely only wanted by a minority. A minority Apple catered too, but I guess has left behind or pushed further out.
The stupid thing is that iPad does have this feature natively, but you need to use an MDM (or apple configurator profile) to access it.
I'm still of the opinion that there's a market, albeit a small one, for a "consumer" MDM product for use cases like this, better parental controls, etc. but almost all are for business and come with some kind of minimum device purchase like 30+ devices.
I found a thread on macpowerusers.com that recommended Jamf or Zoho that both have a free tier for Apple MDM. https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/mdm-for-family-home/39714/8 I'm kind of curious to try it out on my kids' iPads to make them interchangeable.
"... there's a market, albeit a small one, for a "consumer" MDM product for use cases like this ..."
When my children were younger I used configurator to adopt, and configure, their ipod touch devices. It was a bit of a pain but not too bad.
Anyone can do this - configurator is free and runs on any old macbook ...
https://techlockdown.com is the better parental controls (even capable of self-control) that uses Apple MDM. (not affiliated, just a user)
Apple wouldn't approve a consumer focused MDM provider.
Apple doesn't approve MDM providers in the first place.
I’m not familiar with this but interested in trying it. From what I see they do and you need a certificate from them from a Enterprise Developer Account?
You need to get an MDM Vendor certificate from Apple.
They can, and have, revoked certificates for arbitrary reasons.
Apple has historically never been good at multiple users at the same machine. Even MacOS is still pretty bad at it. IMO incentives are not aligned here, they want everyone purchasing their own iPad, so i suspect that their strategy is to not invest too much into profile management as it risks cannibalizing their hardware sales.
Like 20 years ago OS X server had pretty great support for it.
I worked a university lab and had an account on the lab server. I could walk up to any computer in the lab and login and get the exact same desktop experience with all my files and settings. The computing power was all on the local machine, but it basically mounted my user folder from the server.
That was the only time I worked anywhere with that setup on Macs, but it worked so well. Though it was admittedly not your standard office environment — there were frequent compelling reasons for me to be using different machines in different parts of the lab, and not a lot of compelling reasons for me to use that account from a computer on a remote network.
20 years ago, I would still have bought a Mac, nowadays they don't sell any hardware that I would pay for.
I don't pay extra for have less options than on PC hardware, my desktop and laptops can be upgraded at will and without gunpoint prices (forgetting about the whole AI stuff that affects everyone anyway), thus all my use of Apple hardware is project specific and taken from the company's hardware pool.
This is such a weird take because it’s pretty well established that if you just need an average computing device that apples cheapest options are often dollar for dollar per compute efficiency way better than the competition.
If you need anything other than a base configuration that’s not true anymore because apple makes stupid money on their $200 upgrades of 8 gb of ram but if you are a low grade consumer who doesn’t need anything other than the base configuration you would be hard pressed to convince me that the base models of their products are worse value than their non apple equivalents
No they aren't, because Apple doesn't offer good gaming options, memory or hard disk sizes at comparable PC prices in tier 2, tier 3, .... world economies, only the rich kids of such nations can afford Apple prices.
It is only well established on the minds of those earning US salaries, or living in countries of similar economies, G8 style.
> Even MacOS is still pretty bad at it.
What problems do you see with multiple users on macOS? I don't use it intensively, but I've never noticed issues.
As a very simple example, airdrop to macOS with multiple logged in users will frequently pop up the confirmation notification in the user account that is not active.
Facetime too. I shared a laptop with my wife for like 2 years, so it was an ok experience, but we noticed those little things.
I wonder if this was a design choice, so if I’m on the computer and a call comes in for them, I can let them know and maybe hand it off?
The alternative would be they would have to answer on their phone (assuming they have an iPhone, which may not always be the case), then use handoff to get it on the Mac.
Could be, but I've never wanted that. I just answer it on my iPhone or my desktop Mac.
Perhaps I don't understand it but the encryption security model for MacOS/iPadOS/iOS currently doesn't allow multiple different encryption keys for each user. So any user can decrypt the whole drive and while it does enforce user permissions, the security model can't support true multiuser.
I actually don't know if Windows or ChromeOS support this either but this is certainly something Linux can with LUKS et. al.
Yep on ChromeOS each user's home dir is separately encrypted with their own password.
Non-admins getting prompts for system and app upgrades is mildly annoying. The bigger one in a family setting is the clunky sharing. There's no good way to share a photo library or music library between users. The Unix version of making a folder shared by a group doesn't usually work for Apple apps.
USB security prompt disappears when multiple MacOS accounts signed in
Still a problem for me, and has been for years, but I may be holding it wrong. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255929514?sortBy=rank
The solution posted in the discussion is not really secure.
For me quitting preview, or maybe it is settings, resolves it.
Switching users while changing displays often results in an incorrect resolution. That’s such a basic thing: different users have different preferences for their displays and keyboards attached to the displays. Yet this doesn’t work reliably, as if during some moments the login window just doesn’t want to adjust resolutions.
As soon as I added a 2nd user, my Samba share totally broke and days later I still don't have it working. It was fine for over a year and now I'm close to deleting my 2nd user just so I can access my Mac Mini across the network again.
"Fast user switching" has been a feature since OS X 10.5 Leopard. It kind of requires an instructional video though.
Here's an early one I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJKRgs2IUg4&t=7s ("18 years ago")
It's doubly frustrating as iPads do support multiple profiles! Just education MDM managed iPad only. https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...
From what I hear it works okay at best. You basically want to allocate a subset of iPads to a subset of users. You can't just throw 30 ipads onto a cart and let all 30 students randomly pick them, or you'll be evicting profiles unnecessarily. Would do fine in a small household. You reserve space based on # of profiles you want to cache.
Same here. Ours is just a streaming device. Because nobody can really own it. I won't put my password manager on it when the kids can use it, and without that it's near useless. It has my Signal profile so I can transfer stuff (and passwords) to the device but I already feel bad about that. My wife won't put Teams on it because it would bother others and conflict with all other MS accounts. The kids laptops have accounts for all 4 of us.
We switch in apps (ie in netflix). This whole "one person one device" just makes the iPad a shallow consumption device and keeps the laptops for work (and also often for streaming because of this. Btw they are all 2nd hand business laptops running Linux; for the Kids Gnome is very iPad/ChromeOS like and familiar).
It would be so much more useful a device, and maybe we'd even then start buying more, if we could just switch user profiles.
Oh, because it's just a consumption device when we "needed" another one, we got a Xiaomi. Who cares about al the niceties of the iPad anyway when all it does is show video.
So you have one laptop per user?
Yes, for minecrafting together ;)
I see where you are going but they are older laptops bought for cheap. But they do an incredible amount of work. And can be (and are) more easily shared because of the different accounts. I.e., my work laptop is upstairs, I use the laptop my daughter usually grabs and log in to find all my stuff (inc password manager).
I think I'd use our iPad more if it had profiles. And my laptop less. For my partner we're consider an iPad over a laptop atm. And then again it would be nice if the kids could also use it. But as-is it would be a single person device.
I agree 100%. When I purchased my Steam Deck, I was actually surprised that it was so easy to switch between Steam profiles. Last year, my wife and I tried Apple Vision Pro. While we aren't the target audience for a $3,500 headset, we might be tempted at $1,200. But not if each of us needs to buy our own.
I was also going to point out how awesome the Steam Deck multi-user experience is:
It is such a great UX that makes using the hardware very easy for any random Steam user who picks it up.I'm sure the security angle would be something a lot of people would bring up, but if iPad had this feature, they could make great use of Apple's Data Protection Classes[1] to ensure that all per-user data is encrypted when that specific user is not logged in and actively using the device.
1. https://support.apple.com/guide/security/data-protection-cla...
It's inexcusable that customers must beg the vendor for features, especially such trivial ones. It's your device. They shouldn't have any ability to stop you from adding it yourself, or paying someone to add it for you.
Could not agree more, it's wild my AppleTVs now ask for which profile is using it but the iPad still hasn't gotten this.
Profiles don't work well on Apple TVs at all though. You choose a profile on the device, and then you still have to choose a profile whenever you launch any given streaming app as well. I don't know what changing profiles on an Apple TV actually does.
Apps can hook into the Apple TV user profiles if they want, but many don't.
As a developer myself, I respect and understand that it's not their fault that profiles are useless
As a consumer, I don't care whose fault it is that profiles are useless.
the developer needs to write code to detect the current profile. Most app’s don’t do this, and they explicitly ask a 2nd time. Not apple’s fault.
There are some apps that get this right. Infuse recently added support for this.
I don’t know I think Apple should be able to keep COW filesystems for every user to apply atop a read only file system. Unique apps, unique settings (maybe unify tv settings into admin panel) and no cross-contamination or need for app owners to switch profiles. macOS software doesn’t need explicit understanding of profile switching, neither should iPadOS software.
It's not the end user's problem whose fault it is.
as an end user it is my problem when trying to complain in the right place
I agree with you.
and the end user can blame Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, YouTube, etc for not delivering the best experience for their customers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Or they can blame Apple for delivering a developer experience to those companies that makes those companies not want to play ball.
Not that they likely will, as Apple owns the framing.
In my household we have two Apple TVs sitting next to each other, and two remotes with the names of my partner and mine on them as most apps don't properly support profiles so that's the easiest solution. If they do that so people buy more devices...it's definitely working.
I also ended up doing this. With HDMI-CEC powering up the TV and the receiver automatically, then switching to the correct input on any AppleTV remote button press, this is actually a really friction free option if you can stomach buying two devices for the same purpose. I put the remotes in different colored rubber cases (red and blue) to make clear which device is being operated.
At one stage I even had a third AppleTV, that was hooked permanently to a VPN exiting in a foreign country, so I could get TV content and applications restricted to another region I watch a lot of content in. It was so nice to just pick up a remote and instantly have the foreign appleTV experience, rather than juggle VPN apps and foreign Apple Store accounts on the same device.
Probably the only apple platform whose price point is low enough that I’d be on board with this idea.
It’s the vendors not supporting platform features. Usually, actively avoiding it because they think it’d dilute their brand or some shit.
I solved this by just pirating everything and putting it in Jellyfin with Infuse on my AppleTV. Managing profiles and parental controls (and god forbid you also want actual curation) is just totally broken if you pay money for the content, but if you pirate it, it works. Go figure. Dropped from like seven or eight streaming services at peak to I think two. It’s not worth it for the savings, though that’s a nice bonus (it all ends up in hard drives or electricity anyway, though) but it’s the only way to get sane UX. Friggin’ irritating.
I'm not even sure I'd only see the fault with the vendors in this case, as I could very easily imagine that feature to be buggy (From Apples side) or not supporting some use cases that they might want, as no large streaming service seems to do it.
It's a bit similar to them not supporting Apple TV's "Continue Watching" feature as they don't want to hand over all their watch data to Apple.
In any case, once you have a good setup the pirating UX is very hard to beat (I'm looking forward to the day that Jellyfin on tvOS has feature parity with Plex, not a big fan of Infuse personally. That's the issue to follow for that: https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin/discussions/1294).
The one thing Infuse gets me is support for one fairly major audio codec (I forget which one). Have to pay for a license, doubt the official client will ever have it.
The UI is slightly janky out of the box but if you customize it it’s not bad. Key to note is that you probably want to use the “library” menu item for almost everything and drill down from there (that way you can filter by e.g. genre, or order by release date, or whatever, right up front) or else just go over to the entry for the server itself, which gets you a list of top-level items like you see in the Jellyfin web ui.
If you have much stuff at all you need to just ignore top level entries like “movies” or “tv” because (as far as I can tell) they’re just giant alphabetical lists of everything, which borders on useless. I think you can make them not show up at all. You just need search, “library”, and an entry for any server(s) you have to browse them “raw”.
I think the iPad could be a full desktop replacement if they rebuilt the OS as a branch from Mac OS vs as a branch of iOS and allowed for automatic switching based on what it is docked to. That would not be a small task and would fundamentally change the product, but it would be interesting especially for the iPad Pro. When in portable mode it functions as an iPad, but plug into a keyboard folio an it switches to a laptop; plug into a monitor and have it switch to desktop. Plug into a certain mag safe 3 charger in the kitchen and it switches to tvOS; unplug and it is right back to an iPad. I think this kind of user controllable context switching would be really compelling for an iPad, but it would be a complete reengineering an I am not sure the incentive is there.
I'm interested in the opposite direction too. If the iPad could do real phone calls and sms, I would ditch mobile phones. In the process I'd hope to reduce some screen time. I could live with Pod+Pad+Watch, but I doubt they'd ever make that happen :(
Why not just use Google Voice with your iPad?
I really agree with this. Right now I have a folder on my wife’s iPad Air 13 with Claude, brave, and other nerdy apps. This is totally a workaround for not having profiles/multi login.
I agree that this would be an awesome feature, and it would also significantly enhance iPads' value for me.
That said, having worked on account/identity systems at another FAANG, I think that the commenters saying that Apple is holding this back purely to sell more iPads are underestimating the complexity of this feature.
This is not a feature that you just bolt on to the top. It will require a significant ground up rewrite of iOS' fundamentals if you want to support account switching without a full shut down of the device (and even with that, there are complications with shared storage).
There are likely tons of singletons across the iOS codebase for the "current account", and switching between users will easily lead to bugs where the new account shares/accesses state from the previous account.....and these "violations" are much harder to detect via static analysis than you might naively imagine.
UPDATE: I wasn't aware that Apple already supported a bunch of this via MDM. My only point was that if they didn't already build this into the foundational layer of the OS, then this is a very difficult feature to add later. If they already have this, then I don't have any defense left for them.
> Shared iPad requires a device management service and Managed Apple Accounts that an organization issues and owns
I don't want to have to do a bunch of sysadmin just so my wife and I can both see our own YouTube subscriptions on an iPad. Again, you could do this with zero fuss in 5 minutes on Windows XP.
the point is that the OS primitives exist.
Have you read about all of the limitations?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/intune-service/enro...
This sounds like a business opportunity. I have to learn more. Imagine a family MDM service. Would be cool.
How does your assertion hold up give they've already written this code and it's used every day by millions of people?
You just have to turn it on with a MDM profile. It's just consumers they don't let use it.
"Shared iPad" in Apple marketing speak: https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...
And yes, it's existed for years now. That ordinary consumers can't have it is a business choice, not a technical limitation.
I’m guessing the main (technical) hang-up is that it messes really badly with one of the most distinctive things about iPads vs other devices, which is extremely low time-to-interactive from any sleep state. Device been sitting on your desk untouched for three weeks? Pick it up and it’s ready to go almost before you are, and still with a useful amount of battery left (offer void for cellular models).
Not my experience. I have iPad Pro and I only use it for workouts. It sits on my workout machine and once or twice a week I try to watch a ~45 min episode while doing cardio. It’s always dead and needs constant charging. Never last more than 3 days without needing charging.
Weird, mine’s usually good for a month at least if it’s got a decent charge. I just picked mine up off a table in front of me and it hasn’t been plugged in for at least two weeks, instantly on, 82% charge. It’s an earlier Pro 12.9” though, I think the last pre-M-series model, though god I hope they didn’t screw up the battery life that badly in the M series.
If it’s not a regression in the newer models, my top 3 guesses would be:
1) Is it a cellular model? Those have phone-like battery life (non-cellular should have iPod-like battery life, I used to develop for these things and seeing a bunch of “good” Android tablets next to iPads and how huge the idle battery life difference was contributed to my going all-in on Apple, every model I’ve personally seen that’s non-cellular has weeks of useful battery life when idle)
2) Some accessory somehow forcing it to wake periodically? I have AirPods and an Apple Watch, and those don’t do it to mine, but maybe if they were malfunctioning or something, or maybe some other device is doing it.
3) Faulty hardware
[edit] fwiw I do have find-my enabled on everything, never noticed a hit from that.
4) Bad app that is tricking iPad into using battery all the time.
Yeah something weird going on over there. Even my cheapo 2025 iPad with A16 chip ($300) lasts a few weeks if I don't use it - plenty of other non-Apple devices could really learn something about how power-saving mode is supposed to work.
Isn't it already possible with MDM? If so, do these problems all exist? I've considered using MDM just to get this feature, so I'm curious if anybody has experience with it.
There are some drawbacks, not everything is supported:
https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-business-manager-m/sha...
There are other potential issues as well not listed on that page. Apple could address all of these though if they really wanted to roll the feature out broadly.
This is actually one of those things I think the EU should consider regulating. It then means kids can have proper parental controls as they often get introduced to things by being handed a parents phone every now and then.
Same for the Vision Pro. Locking down a $3k media consumption device to a single user is such a greedy move, it's unbelieavable
Absolutely the same thing here. It's why we went with a Galaxy tab, even though the iPad would have been a better fit (sheet music + MIDI)
An iPad is a great art production device. It's great for drawing / painting using Apple Pencil and software like ProCreate. It's good for doing music.
It may be a fine media consumption device (browsing, reading, watching); it's a bit heavy but has a large battery.
I don't see any other serious applications for a home user, such that would play the iPad-specific strengths.
Definitely needed, but also, personally I don't have a need for yet another screen in my life. My iPad is powered like once every two weeks, only when kids beg the shit out of me. I don't particularly enjoy it using it over macbook either. Perhaps OK as your main device if you don't need a laptop I guess.
> The iPad would go from a never-buy to a buy-right-away for me, if they added user profiles.
I am crossing my fingers that that Apple's rumored Home Hub will change this.
It was rumored to be in the original prototypes and cut before launch. I don't know why. They also have very restrictive device limits per account / family and installing apps across accounts is a huge pain. I've mostly given up on solving that problem.
Apple is a closed ecosystem, multiple users feature is a opposite of that.
For example, it's hard to manage app store purchased Apps if it's easy to switch users in iPad. It's hard to manage iCloud sync when switching, it's also related with privacy.
I would not be surprised if Apple fully commit to the one person per portable device scenario for privacy and CSAM laws.
It would solve the age verification challenge by tying a device to a person. Since they can, I think they might.
The profiles work fine in Apple Classroom mode. Just a question of SSD space for the active profile(s) and a cloud source that can be used to swap them around if the SSD saturates.
I have two iPad minis, but they're so unfriendly to use they exist only to display home assistant dasboards. It's overkill, but only because I thought they would be good for other things when I bought them.
The mini is the only iPad I'm interested in. I finally bought one after years of dragging my heels waiting for multi-user support.
Still, I don't use it much. Mostly I'm not a tablet person, but also, the UX is just so bad. It's total abandonware and it shows. The keyboard often covers more than half the screen. The side drawer on maps will cover the "you are here pin" that's in the middle of the screen. And so on. They just don't even try.
I hope that the EU can legislate this kind of functionality into iOS devices.
Interestingly Apple TV now has this - which I find kind of annoying since it asks every time I turn on the tv. Agree though that profiles should be there.
If you are married to Apple Ecosystem then yeah but Samsung Tablets have this feature. Plus better S-OLED screens for content consumption.
my youngest uses our iPad. My wife and I have iPhones and MacBooks and never see the need to use an iPad (I much prefer keyboard input, I like to read paper books and I don't play games; I prefer watching movies on the laptop too). Our teen has a phone, does everything on there, and wouldn't use the iPad either, + laptop for school and some entertainment.
Wouldn't just good screen sharing solve your coffee table problem?
Just have the coffee table iPad be a display for your own iPad. You could even have a virtual iPad on your mac that you show on the coffee one if you don't have your own.
MacOS has 'high-performance' screen sharing using hardware encoder/decoder now. Windows has had this for years and it's so fast it's like actually using the remote computer. It's not like old-school VNC, the only real functional drawback is that you can't leave wifi range.
The point is that I only want one iPad.
I hate this so much that I strongly considered creating a family Apple ID. Nowadays I’m just considering leaving Apple ecosystem altogether. Hopefully soon.
This is the only logical conclusion.
If a company is hostile against its users, then walk away and don't look back.
I am convinced they’ve done research that says they would sell a meaningfully smaller number of units if they added this feature. Sigh…
Obviously. I’m considering buying one of these when we already have one in the family for exactly that reason.
iPad is around 10% of Apple’s revenue. How many parents are going to give their kids their $1500 iPad Pro instead of just buying them a $300 low end iPad?
How would you handle user switching? Would users have to go through a password screen to use anything?
The way Apple TV allows doing it is fine but the iPad could probably make things even easier since it has Face ID authentication as an option too.
The bigger limitation is that most apps don't tie into the profile well yet, but it has not also been around long in a just a niche product as well.
Window with Hello cameras can basically do this today.
TouchID. I’d I tap, I get to see my stuff. If my wife does, her profile comes up.
Fingerprint?
You can thank short-sighted, busy, unprincipled-asshole parents (like me and my wife) for this.
Would I buy each of my 3 kids an iPad every 2-3 years[1] if they had this capability? Hell fuck no. I'd let them use my iPad, which I myself don't even use that much.
But as soon as my kids started texting weird shit to business contacts, or accidentally declining meeting invites because they were playing ROBLOX and the notification was annoying — there was no choice. They'd already experienced the iPad, and I'm too busy to do the super-dad job of weaning them off screens in favor of paper books. Plus, iPads are actually really cool for kids, in a lot of ways.
But the lack of multi-user on iPad is unforgivable user-betrayal. It feels a lot like the gas station charging $25 for a 2L bottle of water right after the earthquake.
Might not be illegal, but... fuck you. The iPad is a great product but it leaves me with a burning napalm hatred for Apple in my heart, just the same as when I try to cancel a US newspaper subscription. Fuck you.
[1]: because, while admirably durable, kids do just wear them out and break them
It's insane to me that Apple TV has this feature and iPad still doesn't.
The Apple TV doesn’t have to worry about user data.
The funny thing is that my Apple TV has profiles! Surely the iPad can too.
They finally added user profiles to tvOS. So there's hope. Maybe.
Let’s see how the cheap rumored MacBook will do. It’ll have user profiles
You pick up the ipad off the coffee table, then what? This is the issue with the ipad since it has been released. What is the value proposition? Bigger iphone? Clumsier macbook? I guess it sells somehow or else tim cook would have shitcanned it already.
I use my 13” iPad Pro M4 almost as much as my MacBook Pro. I’m typing this on it right now. It is by far more comfortable for consuming any kind of media than a laptop.
If I’m researching something and I need to read any significant amount of text I’m going to grab my iPad and find a comfortable spot instead of sitting at my desk. Even though I have 2 big monitors.
I also have a Magic Keyboard that I can simply pop on if I need to write any significant amount, like this, and pop it off again for pure consumption.
It’s an amazing device for watching video (the tandem OLED looks incredible) and I often use the pencil to sketch out ideas.
My library gives free Libby and PressReader, so it would let me read The New Yorker more comfortably than I can on my laptop of phone.
To each their own. To me it would be more annoying to read something on an ipad vs laptop because I'd have to hold the ipad up or prop it up somehow.
Same use case here. Wife sits on the couch and reads magazines from the public library on the iPad. She enjoys the form factor.
I mainly use it to read HN
Android has this feature, even on phones where it barely makes sense
It's not just that. The "Pro" nomenclature is useless if you work in software. It can't run anything despite all that power. The OS is basically crippled. For a few years, I used to run the GitHub cloud environment to work on software, but the latency would just make it insufferable. Any other alternatives, you would need to pay (replit, for example).
It's also quite heavy and bulky, so often times I would have to choose between carrying it or my Macbook Pro. And over time, I realized the MBP still was irreplaceable. I switched back to my MBP and physical books after lying to myself reading book on an iPad Pro was somehow better for nearly 3 years. Sold it off at a loss, but feels better without the useless paper weight in my bag.
There's nothing Apple can tell me to make me buy another iPad ever in my lifetime...unless it runs OS X (non-crippled).
For me it would need vanilla linux or atleast MacOS.
I find this especially galling on the high-price configs, which essentially cost the same as well specified MacBooks. I am in the situation right now where I have 4 iPads in my home which could easily be replaced by 1 to 2 with support for multiple user accounts.
Apple have built much of the software infrastructure to support multiple users on iPadOS, the feature exists for education market customers etc:
> https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...
I also suspect someone at Apple has run the numbers on device sales and has decided the status quo where an iPad is a 1:1 device and makes more money for the company is preferable.
I was pretty surprised when the AppleTV of all things got multiple-user account login support before the iPad did!
I an afraid the same will happen with iPhone foldable. No, it doesn't need to have multiuser support, but how does Tim make you still want an iPad? And macOS - through limitations.
wow, had no idea. that's honestly hilarious!
It's by design. Even Vision Pro - a 4k usd device - doesn't have user profiles because Apple wants to milk every last penny out of their users.
how does this work from a security standpoint? per user encryption?
I was recently given an iPad Mini and I thought, great, I'll just set up a few profiles for the users around the office.
What?
Sometimes the culture shock from Android is just too much. You expect things to be there that simply are not.
I mean Android tablets have this feature.
I'm about to head to the gym with my 12.9-inch 2017 vintage iPad Pro, which is still going strong. I prop it up on the elliptical trainer every other day or so for entertaining me while I grind out an hour of cardio. I use it for reading, watching YouTube, listening to music, audiobooks, etc. It's been my regular gym buddy for years, and is showing no signs of needing to be replaced.
It's stuck on iPadOS 17.7.10, which is fine. I can only imagine that these new generation iPads will easily go for the next 10 years.
Same! Reading through that announcement about MOAR power and AI and all I can think is, "This can't possibly play YouTube videos at me on my spin bike any better than my iPad from 8 years ago..."
I had this thought until I actually replaced my iPad with the m1 chip.
It was actually better at youtube by being more efficient, I could watch videos for a full day before needing to charge.
I’m not sure this is a good thing..
Not needing to charge as much due to much better battery capacity and/or usage efficiency is objectively a good thing, full stop.
How that additional time is actually spent is a whole separate story, but that's entirely tangential to assessing the impact of battery life improving.
In the 1990s we referred to this dilemma as needing a “killer app” to drive an upgrade. Fortunately everything needed more mips, but unless you’re a niche gamer, consumers hit the wall in maybe 2010. Which is why every oem is pushing Ai. Sell moar !! Fill the landfills !!!
I had an even older iPad I was happily using for similar use cases. Until one day a family member bricked it and I needed to factory reset. No big deal, I thought -- nothing important on it. Turns out it needed to phone home to do the factory reset, and since the server it wanted to talk to was no longer up (or perhaps the address changed?) I couldn't factory reset the iPad.
If someone has a work-around I'd love to hear it. Until then, or until Apple changes this design, I think I'm done with iPads. I don't want to pay that much to "own" something that Apple can simply make obsolete by reconfiguring or turning off a server somewhere.
Edit: fix typo
You should be able to DFU, but when it phones home it'll require a software upgrade
Apple recently had an issue with expired certs they had to remedy. That tends to be their bottleneck now.
Yeah that just tripped me up trying to recomission a 2012 Macbook Pro.
Couldn't connect to wifi except through a password-less hotspot. Then I couldnt get online because nothing with SSL was working.
I didnt have a pen drive so I had to FTP off another machine, via my phone hotspot. We got there though!
There’s simply no way this happened, Apple has servers running that’ll talk to even the earliest idevices.
Temporary downtime? Maybe.
There are “service providers” on EBay that I’ve used in the past to unlock iPads used by former unresponsive employees. Not sure about exact situation, in my case they defeated the iCloud lock. Was about a $100 a pop. All done remotely.
My iPad Pro must by the model ahead of yours. I just upgraded the OS to v26 and it’s awful - sluggish, jittery, inconsistent typing experience - borderline unusable for a fast work environment. With no downgrade option I’m forced to buy a new one for work and relegate the older device to entertainment or kids use only.
Being stuck on v17 is a feature for the older A-series chipset.
I'm in the same boat. Thankfully, I only use my iPad for watching videos while I'm cooking, but if were using it for anything else, I'd have to replace it.
When cleaning out my deceased father's electronics closet, I found a 1st gen iPhone. Fortunately its charging cable was nearby. I charged it and, miraculously, it turned on, and was in fact fully usable (minus calling, due to no SIM card). Note that the device is almost 20 years old at this point.
In contrast, none of the various Android devices he collected over the years turned on. One came close, then errored out right after booting.
> (minus calling, due to no SIM card)
Could also be due to incompatible radios. 2G GSM isn’t available everywhere anymore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Phase-out), nor is 3G (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G#Phase-out).
Might actually be worth something, as there's not that many of them around (especially that work).
Sorry for your loss.
My iPad Mini from 2020 is also surprisingly good today. It's one of those devices that just quietly do their job forever. They are a dying breed.
> It's one of those devices that just quietly do their job forever.
Except for the battery, which isn’t that easy to replace on an iPad. And apps relying on anything online (including browsers) stop functioning at some point, because you can’t replace the OS or install arbitrary apps.
Is it significantly worse than an iPhone? I've opened up iPhones 4, 5s, 7, 8, and 13 to do home battery swaps, and none were particularly horrid, especially if you'd not passionate about trying to restore the factory water-seal adhesive on newer models.
It’s a shitload of glue around the screen, so yes, it’s worse.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPad+Air+5th+Generation+Battery...
An iPhone 13 is also a shitload of glue around the screen, though pulling apart an iPad sized device using suction cups does sound especially hair-raising.
The sleepyti.me app I've been using for years no longer works on iOS 18+ and now I keep the icon around on my homescreen as a tombstone :(
They changed to sleepopolis.com and you can just make a webapp for it.
It's not the same :( Are you sure https://sleepopolis.com/ is the right site? Oh no, sleepyti.me does infact redirect there.
hey if that may help i built this https://www.fixsleep.app/tools/sleep-calculator. You can also set alarms from the app
The “point” is very far in the past though. My 2016 ipad still working great for anything online.
I mean, you can take your iPad back to Apple and have them replace the battery, you know. For my current one (a "4th generation" Air) that'd be $120, which is not cheap, but it's cheaper than replacing it for $700 and a lot less stressful than trying to replace the battery myself.
(Having said that, I'm not ruling out replacing it, but I don't think I'll be inclined to do that until they stop updating its version of iPadOS.)
Old ipads are great until apps start not working with the OS. I have a 2017 and Disney+ just dropped support for my current OS version and I can't update further.
Maybe the web version still works? Worth a try.
I have an iPad 9th generation here, from 2021, and it appears to be at the end of its life.
I expected it to last a little longer, despite the cheap price of around $350 in 2022.
After the Liquid Glass update it became so sluggish that I had to turn off animations in the Accessibility settings. And it still is not enjoyable.
iPad Pro (4th generation) 2020 here. Life was good then updated OS with liquid glass. Big mistake.
Lifespan of Apple products continues to amaze me even if it should not.
if you can put up with each update making it worse, slower, less precise user interface. There's a reason old macs run linux rather than macos or go to landfil.
For the amount charged they should be usable for 15-20 years. Enschittification is very much an apple thing. Cue outraged apple cult memebers.
I’ve got an old iPhone 8 that runs great.
I've got an iphone 6 that doesn't, along with a couple of ipads that switch on but are useless and a couple of macs that now have to run linux to be useful in any way.
I've also got an iphone 15 pro that has started on on the enschittification update path. Pauses after presses, many more typos and it's just not slick and nice like when it was new.
But sure, in my experience, apple zelaots just won't believe it happens even while observing it.
Man, the iPhone 15 Pro is the absolute worst iPhone experience I had thus far, really makes me reconsider if I shouldn't just get a cheap android next time. Most definitely not worth the premium.
I bought magnetic self adhesive tape and mounted in on my fridge. Now it’s the family calendar. So nice.
That seems incredibly overpowered for a calendar lol. I imagine doing this with a kindle / e-ink display might also be more energy friendly.
It might be much more energy efficient, but it doesn’t really matter when the annual energy cost is $2 for the iPad
An old iPadOS means an old safari, which means some of the websites are going to get suspicious. I remember one day not being able to open any Cloudflare website.
How old was the device? I have a Late 2018 iPad Pro and have never encountered anything like this. It still works perfectly fine, and having invested in the nice keyboard case for it, I'm hoping to not have to upgrade for a while longer. It honestly might last me 10 years without breaking a sweat.
I have the 2g iPad pro (I think I bought it in 2020 before the pandemic?). I keep looking for an excuse to replace it but it just works so well there isn't much to get from a new one.
My iPad 2011 is still going strong, except that my Airpods Pro won't talk with them anymore.
So should I buy a second pair of work-out earphones or a new tablet? A new tablet would give me back access to app store and many apps, which are no longer compatible with this old slab, but at least Amazon Prime Video and most importantly, VLC still works.
I’d buy a new (or used) tablet. An iPad 10th gen can be had lightly used or refurb for under $200. Or go with the brand new 12th gen that is supposed to be coming out tomorrow at $349 if you’re not on a super tight budget and want it to last you as long as that ancient one did.
Yeah, I think the number 1 use case for tablets is "portable TV" followed by "makeshift touchscreen kiosk". It really doesn't need a lot of features. I have an iPad setup as a little home dashboard and it's literally stuck on iOS 9 but it does it's job.
The newer have worse ergonomics than the old ones. I used to use my previous ipads all the time for reading, but now I find them all fairly uncomfortable for reading and end up not using them. Slightly tempted to sell them and get older models tbh
How was the battery held up? I have the same one, but the battery lasts only 25 minutes max, pretty sure it's shot. Any tips on making sure battery lasts a while? I might even switch out the battery myself.
Lightning cable unfortunately has a shelf life. My current SE2 barely seats the cable appropriately in the connector and if you look at it wrong it stops charging.
If you haven't already, check the port for lint. Scrape it out carefully with a wooden toothpick.
That's what I use a 2014 Sony tablet for. The battery last surprisingly long, but heavy websites are an exercise (well, the other form of exercise) in frustration
How is the battery doing? I find sudden rechargeable battery/controller failures in the 5-10 year range to be my most common cause of upgrade or repair.
Kind of luck of the draw on that one, I think. I have a first-gen iPad Mini on its original battery around here somewhere. Doesn't run for more than a couple of hours on a charge, but it also hasn't exploded yet...
It usually lasts 3-4 sessions. I power it off between uses to preserve battery.
I also have and use this iPad. Mainly for procreate and watching things.
Even at 9 years old, I don't see myself upgrading in the foreseeable future.
I bought and iPad Mini Nov 20th, 2013, and it still works. Slow, but it does. Enough for my daughter to watch YT Kids here and there.
Have a 7th gen iPad from 2019 I use as my daily driver. Has iOS 18 and works great. Was $80 on eBay a year or so ago.
Honestly this is iPads biggest problem. My is from 2019, and there’s just no reason to upgrade, unlike a phone I don’t need it to have a better camera or be lighter or whatever. They nailed it years ago and the hardware is so good the software never really challenges it.
On the other hand, that’s also one of the best things about it. Part of what makes it worth the cost is that nothing important changes and it can last for a long time.
Just curious, why don't you just use your iphone? Why the ipad? Why do you prefer it over an iphone?
The big screen fits perfectly over the elliptical’s display, the readability of ebooks (my most common use) is superior.
Can’t speak for the OP but I do the same because the screen is bigger and you don’t have to look down as much and strain your neck.
Same here. Sucks that Netflix is no longer supported but YouTube works great.
They can only go as far if Apple doesn't deprecate them, unfortunately
I use a 2012 MacBook Air 11" for Zoom meetings. Still runs like a champ. It's stuck on Catalina, but Apple still sends out patch releases.
Depends on how you look at it. While the hardware might keep functioning and current software might keep running, some devs also deprecate their software. I have an old 6S+ that I keep software that I don't want to install on my actual device. Slack informed me that it will no longer function after a date set later this year. Other apps have already stopped working on it because the devs do not want to deal with it.
TL;DR sometimes it's not Apple, it's the app devs that deprecate them.
I have a google nexus 7 tablet from 2013. Thanks to Google unlocking all their bootloaders by default, I can install u-boot and a modern linux kernel on it (thanks PostmarketOS).
Since linux runs on it, I can run the latest versions of great pieces of software like ed, slack in a web browser, etc.
It is 100% apple's fault that they do not open up the bootloader for devices they'll no longer offer updates for and allow the community to build a custom darwin or linux fork. Even though we paid for the hardware, we are not allowed to use it any longer than apple says.
It will go as long as certificates chains are valid.
> TL;DR sometimes it's not Apple, it's the app devs that deprecate them.
Are the app devs deprecating just because their support matrix is too big, or because current SDKs will no longer build apps compatible with those devices?
I think the later case is less common on the Android side of the fence, but Apple is not great about keeping old versions of the dev tools functional, and you end up needing to keep elderly Macs around to target older versions of the OS.
The primary hard part is testing the old versions. Xcode has decent backdeploy support (Xcode 26 supports targeting iOS 15, the final version to run on the 6S), but there's no way to actually verify that it works other than on an older device that's never been upgraded. It's a pretty substantial increase in testing burden and greatly increases the size of the pile of phones that you need to janitor for your CI setup.
Submitting apps to the app store requires using the latest version of Xcode (with a ~half year lag after a new one comes out), so it's now impossible to submit an update to the app store that supports iOS <15.
It’s because every supported version multiplies support burden and sometimes can prevent use of new APIs that substantially improve quality of life unless the dev is willing to turn their code into a patchwork quilt of version checks (which brings its own problems).
On Android it’s less of an issue because the SDK ships separately from the system, but there are often still substantial behavioral differences between system versions under the same SDK that can be a real pain in the rear, especially when it comes to permissions-related issues. This why it’s common for Android apps to have odd bugs or behave strangely on ancient versions of Android — while it’s easy for the dev to produce a build technically runs on a wide range of versions, properly testing against all those permutations of versions and manufacturer skins is practically speaking impossible unless you’re a sizable company that keeps a lab full of devices with CI rigged up to test against them all.
As ex-iOS dev, usually it's because devs want the new shinny APIs. And after some point stakeholders are OK to stop supporting a tiny percentage of users stuck on old iOS versions. In my experience it was never because of Apple.
I cannot buy a device without resorting to Ebay to test my app on iOS 17. There are still bugs that manifest themselves on real devices and not on the simulator. And some APIs are just broken on the older releases.
I have an iPad 4 that is now a single purpose scorekeeper for darts
Would be good for all players to punch the score in on their own iPhone and see the score on the common iPad.
Or, to use an app on the comfy smaller pocketable hypothetical iPhone and to see on the paired iPad when wanting the luxury of a larger display
Yeah same here, stuck on the 2018 one coz its still great.
There is no greater punishment for a corporation’s shareholders and employees than making a product so good and so reliable it doesn’t need to be replaced for a very long time.
Which is... an odd thing to say because Apple's support is ~7 years nowadays, which is more than most of their competition, and their devices are not EOL by then. And yet they're one of the biggest / wealthiest companies in the world.
I think your comment is incorrect. some companies / shareholders push for planned obsolescence, but I can't accuse Apple of that.
Which is why we need regulations on the subject.
Yes we should regulate that Apple fully support an iPad Air 2 with 2GB of RAM. My iPad Air 2 with 3GB of RAM barely runs iOS 26.
While we are at, the EU should also force Apple to make macOS 26 run on an old Mac LCII from 1992
I am not sure if you are being sarcastic here (the tone needed to identify it doesn't work well in the internet).
But yes. My view on the issue is: companies need to support their products with software for a predefined time and after that they should be forec to open source everything needed so people can keep the thing running themselves.
So a decade isn’t long enough?
And we do: https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/news/new-eu-rules...
No, we really don’t. Perhaps regulations on recycling, but punishing poorer people who can’t afford an iPad isn’t the answer.
Can you explain? Good rules on long term maintenance and repairability (which are in effect, see [0]) allow for cheaper, secondhand devices to remain viable for said poorer people. Market forces also exist so you can get a tablet or smartphone for less than €100 - and they also fall under said laws so they should work and be supported for a reasonable amount of time.
[0] https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/news/new-eu-rules...
You think regulations on planned obsolescence punish poorer people? How? As someone who had a friend who would only eat white bread at the end of the month having his old laptop not work would be a freaking emergency.
I owned a few iPads as a kid but as I get older I see less and less reason to buy one.
It kinda sits in the middle of usefulness of a phone and laptop for me. Larger screen than phone yes, but can't run any of the applications I need from a laptop. If it had MacOS, I'd be much more inclined to buy it.
Thank you for making me feel old. The first iPad came out when I was doing my PhD. When I was a kid, Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the web.
Haaa! I also paused reading at “as a kid.”
I bought the 1st Gen iPad for my daughter while I was in the States for work (2010). Not a phone, big enough, and can be Internet-connected with a SIM. Lots of Games, and later my feeling of having bought something amazing was that my daughter learnt to speak brilliant English with Peppa Pig, way before her formal school started.
Palo Alto Stanford Shopping (USA) › FedEx to a Relative in Maine (USA) traveling to Manipur (India) › he trimmed a local SIM to fit the Nano-SIM tray › Happy Daughter on her 2nd Birthday.
> Manipur
Well that's interesting having seen so many of your posts on this site, hullo quasi-neighbour! (I'm originally from Tripura!)
Awesome. Nice to have more neighbors everywhere.
I remember sitting on my friend's couch drinking beer when they announced the iPad and debating if it was ever going to be popular. Time marches on.
I was working at Apple and wondering the same thing ;)
Turns out people like them. Not so much the HN crowd, but c’est la vie.
I remember the total uproar about the name! Everyone said it was too close to a Feminine hygiene product, or too close to iPod. Nobody's complaining any more.
It is too close to iPod imo, but they killed that line around the same time.
entire generation of kids have grown up since introduction of iphone/ipad... I'm sort of glad I got to live what world was like before internet though, still escape into the mountains with kids so they can some of that disconnected feeling but with starlink hovering overhead nowadays just don't feel the same anymore
I've never owned one.
My dad was at Stanford in 84, when the original Mac was announced. We were a Mac family from even before I was born. I watched Steve Jobs give the Macworld keynotes back before everyday people knew who he was.
When I was in college, I actually bought a TabletPC. I still identified as a Mac user - I even tried making it into a Hackintosh - but being able to draw and use gestures was interesting enough that I tolerated Windows on that device.
The day the iPad was released, my parents impulse-bought one. They were heading on an overseas trip that week and thought it would be a fun gadget to bring along.
They had me set it up for them, and I did exactly that. I didn't tinker with it, play around on it, pretend it was mine for an evening… It's the first time I remember a gadget not feeling like a new toy, even though I had spent my formative years dreaming about how cool a Mac you could draw on would be. It was just an object, and I had no interest in it beyond being a helpful family member.
Making "just a big phone" when their phone platform has always been so locked down has done the iPad concept a major disservice.
Mine is 98% for reading comics and 2% learning to draw on Procreate. Most everything else I find awkward to do on it.
My current gen Mini is my Reeder, HN, and Balatro machine. Balatro is intolerable on my 15 Max. $400 well spent and i dont care to share it anyone else.
same here. Drawing on my 13in M3 Air is a delight with the pencil. I sometimes try to do productivity stuff on it like sitting in zoom calls while multitasking on an external monitor, but it's not a very good experience on iOS 18.6
Haven't tried 26 yet, maybe it will be better
I would have been using iPads as my primary computing device for the past 10+ years if they gave us root access. Without root they aren't usable and I refuse to buy them.
I got one a few years ago for drawing on, so far I haven't found it useful for much else. I got the 12.9" one which makes it hard to hold so it sits on a stand.
Later I plan to use it as a lighting control panel but other than that the use cases are limited.
There's a small army of pilots who can't live without one thanks to Foreflight.
I'm kind of surprised that Apple hasn't full throttle on foldables. I'm more apt to spend $2500 on a foldable iPhone than I am $1500 on an iPhone and an iPad. I don't think I'm alone here.
When they introduce their first foldable device this year, keep in mind that Apple has been ideating on and prototyping concept devices with foldable displays long before working prototypes of foldable screens existed. The first Apple patent related to devices with flexible displays was filed in 2011. The first Apple patent related to hinges for foldable devices was filed in 2015.
Foldable device prototypes were publicly demonstrated in 2013. It took five years for the technologies required to enable foldable devices to become mature enough to ship bad products. It took another five years for them to mature enough to meet Apple's scale and quality requirements.
This isn't a "moonshot" (which take decades to build), but hardware innovations like this regularly take a decade to properly productize.
I see your 2011 and I raide you a 1987
https://youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0
They're quite scared to take risks I think, from what I heard it seems it was meant to be released already but they've delayed it a bunch, I wonder if in part due to AVP failure.
“Scared” to “take risks”?
This is a bizarre way of saying “if they ship it and it has reliability problems, they know they’re skating on thin ice”.
Apple’s brand has taken a beating (I’m as aghast with the latest macOS as the next nerd), but people love that when Apple ships a product, it generally works and the hardware doesn’t break.
Butterfly keyboards are a terrible stain on the hardware team’s reputation. “Scared” is the wrong word for how these things work.
I agree, Apple gets hit from all directions.
It's expensive (though largely comparable to business machines) so people dunk on it being low value for money,
People dunk on them for not taking risks, but when there's a reliability problem that would be sort-of acceptable for another product it becomes international news.
When they do take "risks" (like USB-C only) people dunk on them for taking away choice.
Now, I'll be the first to admit, I'm one of the people dunking on them a lot, I was not a fan of the headphone jack removal, butterfly keyboards, discoverability of 3D touch, change of UI paradigm away from Skeumorphism etc;etc;etc -- but I feel like a lot of the other manufacturers seem to get a comparative free pass, which feels unfair.
Rumor has it this year will be release of iPhone fold. They wanted to fix the creases.
Which seems pretty standard Apple. Let others do something, see how it plays out then launch their version of it.
I'm hyped for a iPhone Fold as a concept.
But the leaks I've seen of the size, makes me less excited about it. The phone when folded looks a bit wider and squatter than my Pro Max. And when open, it's smaller than my 11" iPad.
I see the promise of this concept with the tri-fold phones, where when expanded is closer in size to an 11" tablet.
Yeah, that Galaxy tri-fold is gonna be the sweet spot.
My mom has loved the form factor, currently loves it and will continue to love it. That’s basically her hour or two of downtime at night. It’s the perfect form factor for consumers.
Anyone who has all three and found iPad still useful? I’m mostly on my MacBook and use iPhone when I’m not on my MacBook, or Apple TV.
To what end?
I genuinely don’t get the purpose of these high end processors in a tablet. Like more power is nice but what would I do on it that needs it?
Serious gamers mostly steer clear of Apple. Video editors presumably use desktops/laptops. Browsing doesn’t need power. Video watching doesn’t need it. Programming on iPads is cumbersome.
Who is the target audience that gains from this?
You'd be surprised by the horsepower some games require, my wife plays Love and Deep Space and she recently just bought a new iPad because the game requires some good specs and a LOT of storage space. She's not a "serious gamer" as your parlance.
But the iPad is not a console … it doesn’t even do Steam. All that horsepower to play … a couple of forever titles and that’s it. I have the M1 iPad Air and it has never used that processor to its fullest. I think iPad is just an odd device for most people
mobile gaming is much bigger than HN would believe.
A lot of people do in fact, play more than a couple forever titles.
I know multiple weebs that want more powerful ipads to play mobage.
People are bad with scale, everyone thinks moves make a lot of money. They really don't.
Just Gaming in general made something like $200 BILLION in revenue in 2025. Movies made ... $33B globally.
And of that $200B, mobile games were over half.
If the average HN'er would just think of the money they spend on their hobbies (or don't it usually doesn't end well =P) and now apply that to mobile games. They're a hobby or a way to relax for millions and millions of people.
They pay for the "predatory IAPs" because they consider the $10 spent a good investment on the fun they're having in the game they play.
There's a specific group of people who just have the mindset of "never pay real money for anything in a game" - I'm one of them. But even I have to admit that I'm in the minority.
Exactly. They read headlines like "Game X did 100 MILLION revenue in 2025!" and think that's a lot, meanwhile mobile games nobody's even heard of do 20x that.
But I'd argue that the demographics for "people that read gaming news websites" and "people that play and pay for lucrative mobile games" hardly overlap.
On the go video / photo editing is AMAZING on my iPad! More power speeds up some the effects / transition editing. Batch processing, all with a device that has great battery life and is smaller than a magazine. For super heavy stuff, sure, use my Mac, but when I travel and want to be productive on the go, the iPad is awesome!
But that's the thing, most "gamers" aren't the ones that games that normally on Steam are targeting. Mobile Gaming is almost double the size of Console Gaming by revenue. Some people just like having a huge screen for their games.
You’re forgetting just how convenient a tablet is and how little average people care about the latest and greatest triple-A games.
I've found a tablet convenient in 3 situations: Watching video, reading ebooks or displaying sheet music. (And a single tablet is rarely very good for more than 2 of these at a time.) Otherwise it's either too cumbersome or the I/O is too useless.
Just browsing the web on the couch. It's so much better to have a 10" screen than whatever your phone has.
And even on an iPad you can put a video running in the corner while you browse HN or Lobste.rs.
I do wonder about this too… I'm cutting 4K video and doing SwiftUI development on an M1 MacBook Air. My current plan is to upgrade next year, but only if they upgrade the screen. An M4 seems like a dramatic over-spec for a tablet.
> But the iPad is not a console
This is a very naive take - the iPad and iPhone are both multibillion gaming devices, and to dismiss it is short-sighted.
I'd even claim (but can't look up statistics due to a restrictive company network) that singular mobile games like Honor of Kings generate more revenue than 95% of Steam games. Yet a lot of people that style themselves gamers (like myself) never even heard of it.
> iPad is not a console
Exactly. Mobile gaming is a far bigger and more profitable market than console.
Remember, the reason the iPad doesn't do Steam is because Apple won't let it. It is perfectly capable otherwise.
Yeah, maybe I'm too much of a "real gamer" but my iPad sits unused. The quality (and greediness!) of games on the iOS App Store is often worse than the direct-download console slop.
Ive been using mine since 2018, the ipad pro. If you do any drawing then it’s a no brainer, and that’s why I got it in the first place.
Then it was so good that I used it to travel and to watch videos in bed in place of my computer. If I need to work I’ll take my laptop though.
IMO if you don’t use your laptop to work it doesn’t make sense to use a laptop instead of an iPad.
It's great, sure. But why release an M4 iPad Pro when essentially no software can make use of the processor power improvements since 2018?
No software? DaVinci Resolve? Affinity Designer? Final Cut, Procreate, AUM, Logic Pro etc etc etc. As the processors get more powerful more demanding software can be made for it. Running multiple physical modeling AUVs along with FX loops eat up clock cycles. Final Cut Camera on iPhones along with Final Cut on an iPad allow for full multi camera controls and recording from 4 different iPhones with ProRes and log shooting at the same time.
If Apple hadn't continually upgraded the processing power then none of those programs would work. It's up to Apple to make compelling hardware. Better hardware allows more advanced programs. iPads are amazing.
Are serious people actually using the gimped iPad versions of those pieces of software? I can't really imagine doing serious video editing on an iPad.
Procreate for one is not that CPU hungry. My SO's 4th gen iPad runs it just fine.
The Procreate UI literally tells us otherwise. When you create a new image, it tells you exactly how many layers it will allow you to have based on the dimensions you set. This number is smaller for older iPads.
That's limited by RAM, not CPU.
Thats the one I would buy if I were thinking of upgrading right now. We expect new models every year at this point, thats been the strategy of Apple for many years at this point
Because people will buy it.
Banks see it as a mobile device and thus place restrictions on certain things like payment limits.
People complain when Apple doesn't do spec bumps. But when Apple does do spec bumps, people complain again.
It’s as if there are a bunch of different people out there.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
It's just such a shame that really good CPUs are wasted on an OS that still acts as if it had hardware limitations of the 1st gen iPad.
Whenever I need to get anything done on iPadOS, I feel like I'm wearing boxing gloves.
The device's speed is limited by fiddly animations and DUPLO-sized siloed applications.
Its multitasking power is capped in software.
People complained when apple doesn't do spec bumps back in the intel era when their computers were getting legitimately clapped.
Music production is the killer feature that benefits a lot from CPU performance.
I only recently bought an iPad for the first time this year after realizing this was feasible. I’ve always preferred digital music workflows, but hated dealing with a laptop and DAW. iOS supports AUv3 plugins and cross app audio, so it’s pretty much a full DAW experience (I use loopy pro). The form factor forces AUv3 devs to design smarter interfaces.
Plus, I dislike using the iPad for literally anything else, so I’m less likely to get distracted :)
>hated dealing with a laptop
Can you expand on this, as im having a hard time comprehending. At the least, a laptop is a tablet with a built in stand :). How is a laptop hard to deal with?
Music production with a DAW is better on a computer. Music performance is much better on an iPad. There is a big difference between direct touch controls and using a trackpad. Apps like AUM and AniMoog Z highlight what makes music making on an iPad amazing.
And people here don't want to hear this but the closed nature of the App Store is why audio is so strong on both ios and iPadOS. There are far more music apps for those OSes than Android. In addition to that, many VSTs made for DAWS are available on iPads as AUV at much lower prices than Mac or Windows. The lack of piracy, narrow build targets, and predictably great audio implementation makes it both easier to build and more profitable than other platforms.
And IIRC for the longest time Android had massive latency issues with audio production. Just the whole framework was a bit shit and then you have small variations between manufacturers.
On iOS the basic system was flawless and there is no variance as every single iPad is the same and there's a finite amount of devices devs need to test on.
Yea even windows laptops suffer for similar reasons. Bad drivers (esp from discrete GPUs) can cause DPC latency that’s near impossible to tame
It's probably the immediacy. You click an app and you get a fullscreen touch UI with no distractions. Quite different to opening a slow-loading DAW and starting up various plugin windows inside it.
iPad music apps are typically priced far lower than the equivalent PC apps, and there's a thriving community of iOS-only development as well.
For me it's the sweet spot between hardware (which is expensive and annoying to cable up) and PC VSTs (I associate my laptop with work). The fact the iPad can also be used for videos/books/drawing/note taking is just a bonus.
I pretty much agree with all the people who replied. VSTs with heterogeneous interfaces, windowing issues, and having to use a mouse all just get in the way of making music for me. Obviously you wouldn’t produce / master some serious but if you’re jamming it’s leagues better imo
I prefer music production on a laptop, so I'm not the target audience here. But it's so easy to pick up the iPad and noodle on a synth for 5 minutes.
And the music you write is infinitely better than the music you don't. Anything that inspires gets extra points for that alone. :)
Better chip = better performance per watt = longer batteries for similar levels of performance, running cooler. Also it never hurts the smoothness of the interface.
It just ultimately makes it a nicer device to use.
But it's such an overkill. In any case, the question was a bit rhetorical, and highly subjective.
Artists benefit hugely from the extra horsepower. My brother works in the animation industry and uses an ipad as his primary work device when travelling.
iPad is the most absurd device ever. It is fully capable of running a full blown general purpose OS, but artificially restricted to be a YouTube machine. Something you give kids in a restaurant to be quiet. Putting an M4 in it is like Apple rubbing our faces in it. Look at this device that could do everything, but can't do anything.
Comments like yours just go on to show how narrow the worldview of many HN users is. Just because you don't know how people are using their iPads doesn't mean iPads "can't do anything". It defies common sense, too. If iPads couldn't do anything, why would people buy them consistently? I can imagine people buying them once because they don't know any better. But iPad is more than 15 years old now.
I know exactly how it's used. I said in my comment it's used by kids to watch YouTube. By age 4, 58% of children have their own tablet. And YouTube is the #1 app for iPad. This is the majority use case, next to collecting dust on a shelf, or gifts for people's aging parents.
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/researc...
You don't think an M4 chip, amazing, screen, form factor, quality - all for children to watch YouTube videos with is absurd? TSMC all busy making 3nm chips to be used for watching CoComelon. An amazingly powerful, affordable device that is totally locked out of being used for general purpose computing. That doesn't irritate you?
> An amazingly powerful, affordable device that is totally locked out of being used for general purpose computing. That doesn't irritate you?
I'm with you on this one. Hopefully, Tim Cook's successor will take a different approach.
The complaint isn't that iPad is useless, but that it would be equally useful to nearly every happy iPad user if it had a few generations older CPU.
iPad works for lots of people, but the things that iPad is best for don't really need a powerful CPU.
There are few "Pro" apps that you can run to prove it's possible to run them (except for plugins, OS-level helper apps, extra hardware, background processing that doesn't randomly die, scripting more fine-grained than shortcuts, competent file browser, etc.) but you can max out the CPU for a few minutes and go back to a macbook for real work.
> If iPads couldn't do anything, why would people buy them consistently?
It seems you're way overestimating how logical people's choices are.
It's a spec bump, soon they'll introduce M5 powered iPads. More GPU cores, more neural engine cores, more unified memory -- eventually iPadOS features will spring up to take advantage of this stuff. I assume the target audience for this is folks who want to make future-proof purchases or those who likely have more money than sense.
Those are not high end processors? You can get them in apple's most basic laptops. They are just good, but not high end.
They're half a second away from offering an iPad running MacOS (or a tablet MacBook, take your pick). They're baby-stepping their way to this, obviously.
I've yet to figure anything you can do with these but watch videos and play some games; I always end up grabbing the laptop.
Doubt. Apple doesn't see hardware sales as a primary revenue driver, rather they're a rent-seeking company that makes money by being the iron-fisted middleman for the app store. They don't see any benefit from user freedom if it makes them less money in the end.
They're amazing for digital art. That and reading PDFs at near true-life size.
At the very least it is one less TSMC 3nm chip in the hands of competition.
So even if they break even, which I highly doubt, they would rather use it in a kids tablet than let the competition use it to power a flagship phone.
Web browsing modern websites like Github (or some worse ones)
Since there is FinalCut and Logic Pro on iPad now, larger projects absolutely benefit from this.
It lets the iPadOS/app devs write slower software without you noticing too much
People who buy things, mostly.
But is that really a market worth going after?
Is it really worth going after a market known for people who buy things? Do companies like money?
I mean they can add Linux developer friendly features. This way they can sell literally dozens of iPads for hardcore developers.
They sell them to hardcore Apple developers.
Developers isn't synonymous with Linux, or UNIX like for that matter.
I think you missed the implied /s in the parent post.
I guess I have seen UNIX === Developer too much around some social media places.
> But is that really a market worth going after?
Clearly yes. Those things keep selling.
Bill Gates, is that you?
My iPad wins by a large margin the lowest bang for bucks of any competing device I ever purchased A locked down device with no multitasking, even the browser download is interrupted if I switch away.
The true embodiment of paternalism, it protects you from all the scam in the world, except the noble ones who are willing to pay the 30% share.
It has some multitasking on the latest versions of iOS. You can drag a YouTube window up by the bottom right corner and open a Reddit window on another part or the screen if you truly need to be distracted from distraction by distraction.
You're complaining about things that were changed years ago.
It’s 15% if you’re not a (revenue) millionaire.
Not automatically, you have to apply and qualify for Apple's Small Business Program: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...
It's 30% until they approve you.
The iPad and MacBook teams have been in market competition for nearly a decade now while clearly Apple corporate strategy has been trying to nerf each line to prevent them from actually competing. It's an artificial tension that gets more pronounced as the devices get more capable in other ways and the induced limitations are more glaringly obvious.
Things are only to get more interesting with the MacBook with an A chip instead of an M chip, and the MacBook Pro with touchscreen later this year.
I fear at some point we’re going to lose macOS.
Hopefully linux support improves by then to take the defectors if MacOS goes away.
macOS is the main reason I’m using mac, though. the whole integration with the Apple ecosystem is the important thing, the hardware itself is overpriced
My current iPad is the iPad Air 3 (the one with the backlight issue that's never been acknowledged, to my understanding.)
Can someone explain to me why an iPad at all, let alone an iPad Air, needs as powerful a processor as a M4? That's stronger than my laptop (a M2) where I run multiple VMs and more.
The newer CPUs are more efficient and faster. In a mobile format you want the CPU to process everything as fast as possible and then return to a low power mode for battery life.
Apple re-uses the same core across their lineup because it’s cheaper to build 100 million of the same core than to design and maintain two separate CPUs that go into 50 million devices each.
The cpu is better but the software is worse and more bloated so they fight against each other
This sums up my entire experience with technology progress over the past 40 years.
40 years from now we won't be able to boot our device until an LLM codes the software on the fly for it. (Each time it boots, of course.)
The traditional expression of this idea is "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away".
The names are different now, but they were always metonymic.
And of course, those of us in the Motorola/Apple ecosystem didn't have the same problems. :)
Do they really do it just because it's cheaper? I thought they did it for each generation to offer the best of that generation; it makes sense for more powerful chips to have more cores and higher capacity, but it doesn't make sense for each core to arbitrarily be less efficient or less performant just because you didn't buy more of them. Especially because this approach makes the base models an extraordinarily high value compared to base models from competitors.
I have an iPad Pro (2018) with A12X processor which at one point was a "holy crap this this is incredibly fast for how thin it is" device.
8 years later the local apps still run fast, but it struggles with web browsing.
Which is to say, you need a fast processor or web developers will out-bloat your device capabilities in a few years.
Yeah, devs using top of the line MBPs and taking a “works on my machine” attitude keeps web bloat on a constant incline.
I sometimes wish it were an industry norm for devs (a group of which I am a member) to be required to use a $300 Walmart special laptop for a week every two months.
The processor is still fast enough, the ram is too small for modern web apps.
Good point, also likely 8 years of OS bloat leaving less RAM for the browser.
2018 was iOS 12 which was a very good year for iOS optimization, things have been downhill since then.
I have 4 GB which is typical for these, and admittedly low by modern standards. The 1 TB model had 6 GB but was $1750.
I have an iPad for the purpose of 3D modeling in Nomad Sculpt and Shapr3D. It’s an M2 Air, it’s still way overkill, and I’m regularly frustrated at how limited every piece of iPadOS software is compared to the hardware. The dichotomy of prioritizing iPad hardware but iPadOS being arguably their worst actively developed software is baffling.
Maybe there are people out there doing 8k video editing on their Pros, but I’ve yet to meet them.
Apple seems to prioritize hardware upgrades without matching the software capabilities, which is evident for users like you. It’s frustrating to have powerful devices that can’t fully utilize their potential due to OS limitations.
It's Operations Management 101.
It's cheaper to use an old generation CPU, than the effort needed to design and manufacture a custom iPad-only chip.
Same reason why the Studio Display uses binned iPhone chips.
In theory it improves battery life by doing more for less power. It also future proofs it for future workloads giving it an extended lifespan. Also note that thermals will limit what this is capable of compared to your laptop.
There are some decently powerful apps available, like Final Cut Pro, and there is multi-window support including external displays.
I think the percentage of iPad users actually using this level of processing power is small, but there are some ways to do it.
I do really wish they would just allow running a VM on an iPad though at this point. Running a linux or even MacOS VM would be a nice escape valve for a lot of things that can't be done natively.
Can you explain, why not? If it’s easier for Apple to just maintain a fewer series of chips going forward, why not keep it up to date?
If your question is what do people use it for? Well thats different. iPads have a range of users from people who just browse the internet and will never stress this out, to people who do concept art and CAD who will appreciate the power.
But again, why do people always complain that a device got a spec bump?
In theory an iPad is a computer and then you could run whatever you want on it. So maybe the better question is, why can't you run whatever you want on it?
They make those, don't they? They're called MacBook Air?
So the difference is a keyboard? If I attach a keyboard into my iPad, why can't I do all the same?
Photoshop and video editing. Until the M chips, the app options were slim, and now iPads get new M chips as they come out.
You might ask — doesn’t it suck to do either on an iPad? Yep, yet even on my iPhone, I use Photoshop all the time.
VMs are not very CPU demanding usually — usually more RAM demanding.
How do you do any productivity on it if getting files in and out is such a pain?
I had M4 iPad PRO and is just collecting dust. Too clunky to use.
If you're in the apple ecosystem, the "normal" way is to just literally drag and drop files between devices with your mouse, use airdrop, copy on one device then paste on another, etc. "Continuity" makes it stupidly easy, but not advertised well.
The Files app can connect to SMB locations.
You can attach a USB drive. The Pro models have Thunderbolt.
Some creative workflows genuinely benefit from the tablet form factor. I often do serious photo editing on the iPad because I have access to Apple Pencil, and, somehow, holding the thing in my hands like an actual physical object activates some different more analog brain region for me than using a laptop / desktop, and it’s helpful to my creative process. Lightroom for iPad is quite capable but it requires some power.
And then visual artists are often using Procreate, and those files can get heavy as well.
Plus, it’s nice to carry my iPad around with me in a sling and work in a cafe whenever I feel like it. I wouldn’t want to do that with my 16” MBP.
Try running liuliu's 'Draw Things' app, or any other tool that generates AI images locally.
https://drawthings.ai/
They don't need it. Apple is introducing new hardware for the sake of introducing new hardware.
Personally, they need to put the iPad on a two-year release cycle and focus on improving iPad OS.
I assume it's an economies of scale thing now.
It's not like Apple is putting any thought into either the UX or the engineering side of utilising the compute properly (except calculating those glass effects extra inefficiently).
Minimise SKUs and get some use out of the binned chips who have a few failed cores.
It doesn’t necessarily need it other than for niche use cases, but they can’t well have the SoCs stagnate for many years, because SoC updates drive upgrades, whether the buyers really need it or not.
I wonder if a big part of it is simplification at Apples end. It’s just easier and more cost effective to make more M4s regardless of where they end up?
Besides what the other commentators have said — if you're buying an iPad today, wouldn't you rather have the newest/best processor in it?
> Can someone explain to me why an iPad at all, let alone an iPad Air, needs as powerful a processor as a M4?
Because marketing? Seriously, the people I see using iPads in coffee shops are rich retired dudes looking at the news on it.
Because fanbois don't want to wait another year for M5?
Poor software quality, especially websites
Now you can bring the power and convenience of your laptop to iPad with just a single VNC connection. Oh wait…
VNC and other Remote Desktop solutions work, I use an app called Screens to remotely manage my Macs and PC from an iPad with keyboard and mouse.
Or did you mean the other way around? It would be great to have the iPhone mirroring feature on iPads.
Pure marketing, in a couple years it will start lagging doing basic web surfing, like every other iOS device
That has never been true. My iPhone 15 Pro and iPad M1 have no lag.
Those devices are too young to start lagging. Eventually websites will bloat to the point that you will definitely notice. My estimate is that it will be at the 7 year point.
7 years seems a bit beyond a couple of years. And past the life of most any Apple device.
This would go from "toy for children" to "instant buy" for me if it ran Linux and not an entertainment pipeline with a captive app store.
Yes, exactly. Second this.
I've run nixdarwin + aerospace now for a while on the older macos version and it's insanely how the customized workflow can improve productivity.
Recently I started experimenting with nixos/asahi and it's waaaaay more better than even what I had on macos.
“If this was not remotely like what it is it would be an instant buy for me”. Ok.
Not true.
Apple made a non-technological and purely artificial and somewhat capricious decision to not sell a product that was worthy of the Apple brand.
They continue down this road because next quarter is more important than next year, and sycophants continue to buy unusable products just to show off the Apple logo to people who don't view it as a Veblen good.
Apple could choose to sell to everyone, but instead sell to a minority. This is a choice. During recessions, it is not a good choice, and we have been in an almost persistent global recession since 2008.
As long as Apple can claim they have a $1T market cap, nobody wants to hear that the emperor is buck naked.
Even JIT-enabled Linux VM on an iPad would make it a perfect travel workstation. Too bad Apple won't let iPad eat the MacBook pie.
Had an M4 iPad Pro for nearly 2 years. Everything's so fast and fluid I doubt I'd notice if the CPU were twice as fast.
If this ever died I'd likely replace it with an Air - the Pro is overkill for what's basically a consumption device.
I think the big difference why I would go for a pro if I ever replace my mini is ProMotion. It seems like even in this new model you are stuck with the old lower refresh rate which is quite jarring.
Performance wise, even older ipads were well beyond what I need so if you can handle lower refresh rate for sure a better deal.
There's even a paragraph saying it's good for the environment. This means Apple really cares about the environment. That's good! So I suppose I can install my community OS of choice painlessly after Apple decides to stop supporting it so it doesn't turn into e-waste that day despite being perfectly good hardware for many more years?
I also suppose parts can be easily replaced without also replacing everything including the motherboard should something stop working?
Sarcasm, obviously, but until they do these things, their environment selling point is just irritating and scandalous and they should just focus on the other selling points.
Apple will repair or recycle for you.
Recycling when it could run Linux after Apple stops supporting it? That would be much better for the environment.
The word "value" appears four times in that press release. I sense a theme in the marketing this week.
Also "upgraders" (11 times, meaning a kind of buyer), that's a new one for me in these introductions.
The next day and the cheapest thing seems to be $1k (base M5 MacBook Air) sitting alongside new MacBook Pro variants and Studio Display XDR :D.
I hope the budget MacBook appears this week nonetheless.
If they wanted to provide value they'd add MacOS to their tablets.
Yeah, instead we'll have a slightly cheaper MacBook Air, I'm guessing, that still costs more than the perfectly adequate iPad.
I hope they never do that. It would compromise macOS too much.
It’s been 16 years. Move on already.
Between the iPad Air and iPhone 17e it's definitely the "value" day. It will just be a ramp up to the MacBook Pro. Makes a good contrast and marketing scheme.
At least they are not using "affordability"
This is an incredible piece of hardware, I just don't know what to do with it
how is music production on it these days?
GarageBand is fun, and capable of making surprisingly complex music. Logic Pro is also available on iPad now, but it's only available with a $15/month subscription, so I haven't tried it.
For artists, there are a lot of good tools: Procreate, Art Set 4, Adobe Fresco, Artrage, etc.
I really like this setup:
iPad + Korg microKEY-37 + KORG Gadget 3 + all a bunch of KORG apps
No subscriptions. Keyboard is wireless but no noticeable latency. In my workflow I pretty much never need more keys but if I do I just use a MIDI adapter and plug a larger keyboard.
KORG apps go on 50% sale several times every year.
It runs PlugData, the plugin version of Pure Data! You can easily bring down the best iPad processor with the circuit~ object. ;)
i've been meaning to checkout pure data, this is cool thanks for sharing
Still subpar, only real DAW available is Logic Pro, the audio stack behaves differently than macOS, no support for VSTs but has support for the AU format.
A friend who I make music together had an iPad that we tried to add to the setup, in the end after some months we chucked it aside and just got a MacBook for our shared studio instead.
I agree you won’t find a DAW as powerful, but some of the purpose built DAWs are so much fun. Loopy Pro you can build whatever interface you want via widgets.
And while VSTs don’t run, the AUv3s on the App Store tend to be much cheaper.
If for nothing else, I think it’s an excellent replacement for a guitar effects processor like Helix. Plus everything is backed up / restorable and you don’t have to suffer with a knob-based interface
> no support for VSTs
yup, that kills it for me
Drawing on it is incredible, reading papers work well also but a folding phone is better.
I had the same problem with my M4 Pro. So I sold it.
The iPad Air is in such a weird spot.
Heavier than the Pro, 60Hz, but more Ram in the M4 Air than the M4 Pro? It makes no sense. Who is this for?
I can say they are used heavily in the construction industry for Autodesk Cloud to render drawings for field workers. Very resource intensive.
Ideally Apple would finally do their Surface/2-1 with iPads, but Apple being Apple, rather sell an overpowered tablet, and a Mac laptop to go alongside with it
Some places even do a bundle "discount".
I don't think even Apple knows what they want to do with the iPad.
I could buy the "companion device" niche for a while until iPad OS 26 came along, which took away most of the "touch first" multi tasking and replaced it with a model that heavily favors mouse and keyboard use. I actually use my iPad less now since the update, because I still primarily used it as a tablet, I don't even own the magic keyboard/trackpad for it.
Now it's essentially a gimped macbook, and it's not really clear on where it fits in their product lineup. Is it supposed to be a laptop replacement? A companion device? An art tool? An expensive e-reader? No one, not even Apple, knows.
So yeah, they either need to come up with a clear vision for what it's supposed to be, or finally just let it be a 2-in-1 macbook with apple pencil support.
I think they’re very happy to have the 2 parallel product lines; they might overlap a bit but who cares, business is about the numbers, not ideological purity of product lines.
The line they’ll probably never cross is that the Mac can run software in a (mostly) non sandboxed mode, with unrestricted background processes, which means it’ll always be the platform of choice for developers. Those extra restrictions on the iPad makes them more free to push it/experiment with it in the direction they wish (for better or worse, as we’ve seen with all the wonky windowing implementations, although the current one is mostly fine)
I love my iPad for drawing/photography, reading comics, and its extreme portability; I love my MacBook as a developer and as my main productivity machine.
Apple has no idea what the iPad is for but somehow they sell 20 million of them a year...
Apple has been very clear what the iPad is "supposed" to be. It is a touch screen computer. Between its form factor, touch first OS, built in camera, and possible cellular capabilities it can do a lot that a Mac can't do. Something as simple as walking around with it and handing it to someone like a clipboard opens up a million uses in the field that would be much more awkward with a traditional laptop. Artists drawing directly on the surface, musicians playing with touch controls, etc. all take advantage of how the iPad works.
If you insist on using programs and workflows designed for laptop computers the iPad will never make sense to you. I use AUM, Drambo, and a variety of other soft synths and effects on my iPad in conjunction with my analog synths. It's a very different experience than a regular computer.
Pity that Apple cannot envision anything better than Playgrounds for coding on the go, it fails rather short from Dynabooks vision.
As always, I _wish_ I had a use case for an iPad. Seem like such powerful machines hindered by where they live in the serious-computing space. The iPadOS being much more restrictive doesn't help either.
I wish they could repurpose macOS to touch screens... Oh well.
Same here. I have tried my dangedest to want to need an iPad. Once the new wears off, I just cannot find a use for them.
Tangential, iPadOS 26 is absolutely unusable on iPad Minis. Who needs window management on an 8" screen?
-you can turn it off globally in settings
-some people use it docked
-if it wasn't available, someone else would be complaining about that
The Apple of the past never thought twice about people complaining about the lack of them implementing something that would be bad UX because they were confident in their design prowess.
Click targets on window controls are too small to ever make sense. Nobody needs this.
> if it wasn't available, someone else would be complaining about that
Really? I genuinely know no one that uses Stage Manager.
As the sibling says you can turn it off, but even the non-windowed UI is still not well-adapted to the small form factor. Apple doesn’t put any work into it. One can hope that some improvements might carry over from the upcoming foldable iPhone, whose inner display will only be slightly smaller, but I’m not holding my breath.
Memory increase to 12GB, guess they still have reasonable pricing.
At this scale, don't companies lock in their prices well in advance instead of paying spot prices?
Don't vendors as big as Apple lock in their prices and contracts years in advance?
Rumor has it that Samsung hit them with a 100% price increase on RAM and Apple took it without even trying to negotiate
If that rumor's true then Apple has a memory fab hidden somewhere that's going to be revealed soon.
They have like 40%+ margin on hardware, even when raw mem chips quadruple in price I doubt they lose more than a few single digit percent of margin and I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to take the hit to keep their pricing the same as they always are.
Keep in mind that before the whole memory price hike crisis they were already charging ~3x what the competition charged for ssd/ram upgrades
Apple is likely a large enough consumer to fully utilize a fab.
Floating 100% price increase, or did they lock that number in as a ceiling for some period of time?
Bringing their profit margins down from ludicrous to just absurdly high.
The base model has only 128GB of storage. IMO they are pushing uses to upgrade storage more aggressively than ever. This should make up somewhat for the increased cost of volatile and non-volatile memory.
I have a 6 with cracked glass and won't buy another one until 3rd party browsers can release without webkit. The net is an awful place without uBlock, which I am reminded about every time I try to surf with the ipad...
I have uBlock Origin Lite for Safari [1] on all iOS and iPadOS devices in my household. No one complains about ads anymore.
1. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
You might try wBlock:
https://github.com/0xCUB3/wBlock
DNS-based blocking is the way (possibly via conditional VPN if you can tolerate the minimal latency bump).
nextdns.io works fine on my iphone so ipad shall be fine
Your answer is Vivaldi, it has a built-in ad blocker that in my few years experience works exactly the same as ubo out of the box. If it wasn't for Vivaldi, I wouldn't buy an iPad because of what you described.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wipr-2/id1662217862
After having tried Firefox with UBO on Android, I can’t say I noticed any difference compared to Orion on iOS.
You can get Wipr 2 for iOS and (for me) it's been as good as uBO.
Doesn’t AdGuard work?
Yes, AdGuard works. That’s what I use, although I appreciate the other recommendations in the sibling comments above.
I just hope they update the iPad mini. That's the only model worth the money for me, at least.
I’ve been astonished at how bad the battery is in my base iPad I bought last year.
Granted I’m switching to it from an iPhone 17 pro max but still the thing goes from 100% to 80% overnight without being used and a 40 minute Zwift ride routinely drains 15-20%. Makes me much more reluctant to buy another as it has to be tethered to a charger.
I have an M3 iPad Air. I only upgraded after my M1 iPad Air 4th generation (IIRC) stopped turning off and it was way too expensive to get a replacement board.
I am desperately clinging on to these because they still use TouchID. Words cannot describe how much I hate FaceID as a person with poor vision. When I'm forced to use it on my iPhone (which is all the time), I have to move it away from my face or I get the "Try again". Super-annoying.
But it gets worse: after a certain number of unsuccessful tries, you're forced to use your passcode anyway and FaceID has false negatives ALL THE TIME.
It's even worse on n iPad form factor where the iPad often isn't facing you directly. It might be attached to a keyboard, on a stand, on your lap or on your chest (when lying down). Many of these angles just don't naturally work with FaceID.
If only Apple would give me a FaceID OPTION on an iPhone.
I haven't bought a keyboard or anything. If I wanted a device to work on in any way, I'd still use a Macbook Air. But I do love my iPad Air.
I prefer TouchID over FaceID also.
But I'm curious, why does FaceID work less well if the user has poor vision?
That’s nice. Now how about Apple put some engineering resources on squashing the seemingly proliferating fundamental glitches all across their OSs.
I’ve recently started experiencing a new-to-me glitch where the Safari unibar just drops the input. Apparently, it’s been a thing that’s been around for several years though. How is it a thing to drop inputs in your browser and it’s not fixed at least 9 years later?
On a related note; that’s what always concerns me the most about things like AI and robotics, the frontier is constantly pushed, in spite of the rather major, fundamental flaws and glitches … as people are pushing AI and robotics into taking over everything.
What happens when the glitch is in the do not start Ai robot nuclear war routine?
Apple’s hardware teams are seriously running laps around their software teams. Which is odd, because historically, it’s been the opposite.
Until iPad OS actually becomes capable for complex work and multitasking, I can’t see what the benefit of strapping such a powerful chip to an iPad is.
iPad OS is already capable of complex work and has been capable of multitasking since it was iPhone OS v1.
ChromeOS is "capable of complex work" on $200 tablets. And it can compile C++, run Windows games and use full-fat web browsers.
In a head-to-head comparison with real desktops like macOS or Windows, iPadOS can be generously described as a no-show.
I wish Apple hadn't decided that colors weren't for pro users. I would love to have any of those.
I'm still upset that they dropped the Smart Keyboard Folio. For me, that was the perfect keyboard case. I was hoping some third party would copy the design and release a new case but it never happened.
The Smart Keyboard Folio is great! I got one on clearance a few months ago and use it whenever I'm using the iPad around house/town. (If I'm travelling out of town with my iPad where I won't be able to use my desktop keyboard, I bring my Magic Keyboard instead.)
It's so good that if Apple changes the form-factor of the iPad Air, I'll probably take that opportunity to buy the last Smart Keyboard Folio-compatible iPad Air to stretch my use of it as long as possible. (Though I worry that at that point I'll wear out the internal ribbon connectors eventually.)
Somehow Woot still has a supply of the Smart Keyboard Folio for certain 11" iPads Pro/Air.
My wife is still using an older gen 11" iPad Pro and her keyboard folio stopped working (they fall apart after a few years ), so I took a gamble and ordered one. It arrived in the original, sealed packaging. As far as I can tell, it had never been opened, and it is perfect condition and works great. My wife is very happy. I bought a second one for when this one falls apart.
https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Smart-Keyboard-11-inch-iPad-Pro...
That's true of most OEM's. Most phones will be cases so I can at least understand that argument, but I don't think as many tablets are in cases.
Can you connect it to USB-C/Thunderbolt monitor/dock and use it with keyboard and mouse?
Has been for a while, assuming you can get work done on the iPad UI. It doesn't do a normal mouse and there are some limitations to things like screen dimensions.
Works in a pinch but Apple is not going to compete with themselves on this front, they're expecting you to buy a macbook for serious work and an iPad for work in a pinch.
yes. Has been possible since at least M1.
Buy M-based iPad, nice monitor, keyboard and mouse. Connect mouse and keyboard to monitor via USB. Then iPad via USB-C/Thunderbolt to monitor. Everything "just works" and you can handle surprisingly high amount of work this way
Can you share more about this experience please? To me, you're still left with apps that are designed for a touchscreen and consumption.
If you are using an iPad as a second screen - you get the same app you have on your mac (obviously, iPad just acts as a second screen: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102597).
If you are using an external keyboard and a mouse with it - you will get the same touch UI, yes.
Many apps are missing many keyboard shortcuts that you may be used to if you’ve used the equivalent on the desktop. You’ll need to keep the iPad screen accessible to tap on UX elements. There’s also the issue that shortcuts that do exist may be hard to discover because there’s no menu bar to look in.
> Many apps are missing many keyboard shortcuts that you may be used to
This is true. To see the ones that are available, hold down the command ⌘ key to get a scrollable list of all of the shortcuts for the app you’re currently using, and use Fn-m or globe key-m to see a list of the system shortcuts.
Specs show that Pro models got Thunderbolt and Air only got USB-C.
Very vague specs.
Can iPad Air USB-C deliver 4k 120hz or how much bandwidth that USB-C got?
It's been possible since the iPad 2.
I used to code HTML/CSS that way back in... 2011?
Had no problems connecting iPad Air 4 to external display via USB-C DP. Have not check whether periphery devices work this way though - I used BLE keyboard.
I was about to ask the same. I'd like to get an ipad for the same purpose. The iPad pro can for sure, but I don't want to spend ipad pro money.
I don't understand people complaining about Apple using ~nearly latest processor on a device refresh. What are they supposed to do, not put a year old CPU inside, use something from a decade ago?
If you are on an iPad from 5 or so years ago there, or happy with your device, sure - there is no reason to upgrade. But the very same reason that you do not have to upgrade is that Apple put a fairly powerful chip in your device a while ago that is still holding today.
It should be a common sense that these devices are for first time buyers or for users of very old devices that finally end up upgrading, and why would those people not be treated with a fairly recent internals?
I doubt the gripe has ever been about putting the latest tech in it. It’s more about putting the latest tech in it and then having very little to actually do with it.
I am still waiting for iPad to support docking stations and multiple 2-3 monitors. Until then, they are not serious about productivity and making ipad a forst class product.
They should do the same for iPhone.
I had a 2008 iPad until few years ago and I think it was the most impressive device I ever owned. I couldn't believe how much performance and longevity you can get out of such a small and simple device, for the price which hasn't changed in 8 years. I sold it because I spent most of my time on a laptop, but looking at this new M4 Air iPad makes my wallet tingle. I first want to see what the low cost Macbook is like, hopefully that's tomorrow.
The iPad 1 was released in 2010
I made a typo, it was supposed to say 2018.
Unless you had a prototype.
I still have no idea wht to do with my previous gen iPad Pro..
imo the Pro are for serious creative types who do either 3D modelling, illustration, photo editing, video editing or music.
If you just browse the web and stuff like that you might just get a regular iPad.
No side profile pics on the page. My only concern would be can it lay flat on a table for taking notes or does it have a camera bulge that makes it wobble?
> does it have a camera bulge that makes it wobble?
Yes https://www.apple.com/v/ipad-air/af/images/overview/closer-l... from https://www.apple.com/ipad-air/
I hate apple. Can't they just add a second bump on the other side? They're being a PITA with this wobble and it's been going on for like 15 years now (iPhone 7 forward)
FWIW, the iPad Air I bought a couple years ago has a small protrusion for the single camera lens, but does not wobble when laying flat and is not really noticeable. This latest iPad Air has a similar design.
Does nobody care that iPadOS lost its old Split View workflow? I would never consider another iPad until it's brought back. Their multitasking story is a total mess at the moment. Hopefully Lemay can work it into iPadOS 27
If you were utterly confused, like I was, how the iPad Air M4 compares to the iPad Pro M5 and the iPad Pro M4, this 3-column comparison table from Apple's website might help:
https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?modelList=ipad-air-11-m4...
The quick summary:
- iPad Air has 2 stereo speakers, rather than 4 speakers as Pro models
- Touch ID in top button rather than FaceID as Pro models
- iPad Air is slightly heavier (???) than either Pro model
- screen of iPad Air is a bit less bright
- no nano-texture display option on iPad Air
- no true Thunderbolt connectivity through USB-C port on iPad Air
- all devices can use same Apple Pencil Pro...
- ... but the iPad Air takes a special Magic Keyboard (supposedly due to form factor)
- camera array is slightly different on iPad Air (no ProRes video)
You left out IMO the biggest difference (and the only one I'd pay for): the Pro is the only iPad model with ProMotion (aka. 120Hz refresh rate).
When will I be able to run Xcode on one of these?
Wait for the alleged touchscreen MacBooks to drop, possibly this week
wait .. what ... for real? Take my money Apple.
looks like never
:(
So no new Macs today, but there may be 3 days of announcements in total.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/02/apples-next-launch-star...
I love my iPad, best TV i have ever owned.
Ha, yes. I have a Galaxy A7 lite that is my TV. Much cheaper and has a 500GB SD Card in it as well.
I have the M3 iPad Air… I won’t have to replace it for at least 4 years because it’s stupidly powerful but both of its hands are tied because of iPad OS. Apple needs to get serious and make a version of MacOS for the iPad otherwise these upgrades are meaningless for most users.
Is it fast enough to run Liquid glass?
That's very funny. Bravo.
Maybe my pockets are not deep enough, but I completely fail to understand the value proposition of iPad Air vs the regular iPad. If you want something powerful or big - go with Pro, if not - choose the "regular", much cheaper.
What am I missing?
Better chip (A series vs M series), better screen (sRGB vs antireflective fully laminated P3), more options available (1TB, 13”), little qol things like a better WiFi chip.
It’s just a nicer device for a bit more money ($349 to $599). Not everyone wants to jump all the way to $999 for the Pro.
fair enough, thanks for elaborating
So you drive a Chevy Spark or a Mercedes Benz S-class?
I think the perfect combo is a powerful Mac Mini plus a portable iPad — let macOS handle the productivity work, and just use the iPad as a big-screen AI terminal.
Let me know when I can buy an M5 Max Macbook Pro that can run local open weight LLMs. Until then, nothing else is particularly interesting, everything I already own gets the job done.
Apparently today: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-macb...
I bought a regular iPad in 2017, I'm really impressed that almost 9 years later it's still working and the batter is still great (especially for reading).
Yes buy an iPad and have it be laggy like a 90's computer within 2 years because of "updates".
When the M1 ipad came out I said I'd upgrade from whatever my model year 2020 ipad is once I could run a Linux VM on it without rooting it.
Still waiting.
Why did you get an iPad if you wanted to run a Linux VM? Wouldn't a Macbook Air have been a better choice?
Because they like the hardware? The better question is why Apple pretends these devices can't run VMs.
I bought an iPad for the same reason ~everyone does, for media consumption. But if I could use the hardware to do more interesting things then I'd be willing to spend more on a more powerful model.
ok
The Pro really looks like it's struggling for a reason to exist given how much cheaper this will be and the difference in feature set.
FWIW, my wife is a student and her ipad has probably helped out her out a lot, for a lot of reasons:
* compact form factor allows her to study anywhere easily, especially on public transportation
* can access the internet almost anywhere
* note taking and drawing diagrams with apple pencil
* communication wit for both personal (imessage) and school study buddies (discord)
* can entertain herself with netflix, youtube, games etc when she wants to wind down
* ai apps like perplexity has helped her a lot with writing and research
She also has a laptop, but is rarely used. She even tends to type on her ipad keyboard. The larger form factor for the pro helps with that too.
Maybe a minor thing, but the largest pro in landscape is just barely smaller than a two-page spread in a comic book, making it possibly the best way to read digital comics.
Though, I personally don’t need all the horsepower and would get lower-end iPads in that size if they existed and were cheaper.
The iPad Air and iPad Pro are both available in 11" and 13" variants. 30% savings if you want like-for-like storage, almost 40% if you can do with less.
Oh shit, I didn’t know they had the 12.9 in a lower spec config these days!
That’ll be what I finally get when I replace my current old-ass pro. Never needed the power, just wanted the size.
I fucking love my OLED display on my iPad Pro.
i hate mine. when watching movies, scenes that slowly transition to another view look jaggy. Does that happen to yours?
The pro has the perfect form factor for sheet music. Absurd over kill in terms of other hardware, but there's really no alternative for musicians (other than paper).
Was I the only stunned by the quality of the video ad? It’s really advert at its peak, to the point yet artistic.
If it can be used for inference, who cares right? Just have claude vibe code some objective-C or run the Enclave app.
and Claude is remote inference anyway, just an http api
> iPad Air is a fantastic value
TIL American English treats “value” in the financial sense as a countable noun
iPad’s seem to be in some netherworld with no real purpose to them. They are not phones or laptops and so the main use case outside of consuming media at times is for conference room and reception kiosks?
I didn’t understand iPads for years. As a half engineer half email monkey, doing work on them is still next to impossible, especially with nerfed versions of Office applications.
But, they are excellent for media consumption, particularly reading and marking up PDFs. I am able to focus while reading in a way I cannot on a computer. Procreate is amazing (drawing brushes with a pressure sensitive pen and layer/mask support all in one). Great for playing Civ on a flight. And it does all those things in a comfortable form factor while being fundamentally a pleasant device to use.
All that considered, the iPad Air is not that expensive, and it will probably last you a decade before it needs replacing.
You lay not travel much where opening a 16” MacBook Pro even in economy plus is a lean back risk and typing misery situation. iPad much better for tray table things. I have the 11” just for this purpose
Any chances of getting a new Apple TV 4k this week in time for F1 launch on AppleTV+?
Sure, there’s a chance. Don’t know why you’re asking, though, because those that know aren’t talking and those that are talking…
What’s wrong hardware wise with the current one?
I think its at least 3 years old
And? What do you expect from a new one?
I wonder how well local inference would work on these.
The M4 has been out for a while, it's not anything special for inference.
I don't understand why they still have such thick borders, compared to smartphone screens that almost get to the edge. Anybody knows if there's a technical reason for it?
Tablets need an edge where you can grip it. Without thicker bezels, it’s harder to hold it without your fingers being on the screen. This is much less of an issue for phone-sized devices.
This has always bugged me.
- Why is grip a feature of the bare tablet and not part of a case accessory?
- Why is the grip point the flat glass front of the display, instead of anything more ergonomic for actually holding it?
Phones don't do this, not even 7" phablets, nor for holding them horizontally, nor holding them with two hands gamepad-style during gameply. Why do tablets?
Because most tablets are intended to be as thin and compact as possible while being too large to wrap a hand around. Imagine the complaints if Apple told people to buy a case so they could hold the product. Imagine putting a ledge on one side to hold it oh hey, it's a Kindle Scribe (and still ALSO has a bigger bezel than the iPad Pro.)
I think it's an ergonomic issue. Phones (even the Pro Max size) can be held with one hand or two hands without resting your palm or pinching the edge to hold it. You could but it could cause some erratic behavior.
A tablet though doesn't hold well when just pressing on the sides. So having some place to grab and rest your palm is more necessary here. They probably could go thinner with borders but it's a balancing act of usability and aesthetics. Also have things like the camera to account for and on tablets you don't have to make a punch-hole or teardrop. The iPad Pro's also package in FaceID cameras so it could be a product consistency choice too.
I don't think it is technical. Because of their size, they would be hard to hold without covering portions of the screen, if the bezels were thinner. As is, my fat fingers get in the way already.
To each their own, but I would rather have a larger border where I can rest my thumb without causing an accidental press/scroll a few times a day. The software-based rejection is not good enough and I am very willing to go back to the older look of the iPad if offered.
I already have a hard time not accidentally touching the screen while adjusting my hands' position or whatever with today's iPad's "thick borders"
HOMM3 on an iPad mini was peak iPad
So base iphone 17 is 256 GB, and the iphone 17e which is the cheap version is 256 GB, and… the base version of the midrange ipad is 128 GB?
What a spiteful company
People take tons of photos and videos on their phones. Download 40 GB of music and podcasts on Spotify. Keep 50 GB of videos in their messages. All at once.
iPads usually aren't used as much for these things. They're used for browsing, streaming, gaming, reading... mostly things that don't take up nearly as much space.
It's not spite, just matching device capabilities to user needs without unnecessary upgrades that will lead to a higher price point.
I use tons of storage on my phone. Not much on my iPad. Pretty much just downloading TV shows before a flight, but 128 GB gives you plenty of hours of that.
I'm not really sure what's spiteful about that
I'd hazard a guess that people use significantly less storage on iPads than their phones. Phones get filled with photos and videos, whereas people use iPads primarily to browse social media and stream videos.
I have an iPhone and an iPad Pro, and I use far less local storage on my iPad than I do on my phone. I know it sounds counter intuitive. I wouldn’t be surprised that this is the norm.
ipad is one of those devices that doesn't need to exist, along with apple watch.
I honestly don't know why anyone would want to get this over an Honor MagicPad 4 with OLED, more storage and a less restrictive OS environment
I still have the 2017 pro and i can't imagine a good enough reason to buy almost 10 years later a new gen. And i'm the guy who loves buying new stuff without need. It's a dumb consumer device with the hardware of a pro device but you can't use it as a pro device. So what's the point of upgrading? Watching Youtube with 10x more powerful hardware than 2017? Really?
Bet they were hoping for a quieter news week for these announcements.
I still don't get what they're for. Most people I know end up in the same situation as me, buying one thinking you'll use it mostly as a writing device but then either it ends up in a closet or just a web browser you use while sitting on the couch watching TV. In that case what does any of the improvements matter?
With first party native apps it's not great for writing, editing pdfs, nor drawing. I mean the notes app doesn't even have simple things like letting you zoom in. You'd think a common use case would be to use it as a drawing tablet for your computer? Maybe not a common use case but I think something a lot of people would end up using a few times a year (countless times I'd love to have a whiteboard on a zoom call but setting that up is annoying)
There's great third party apps to do this but I think it just shows that either Apple is disconnected or just trying to get money from developers.
It's also not great as a computer. I mean in another thread I've mentioned my laptop (macbook air) is a glorified ssh machine and frankly, an iPad should the perfect device for that because its size. But it seems they don't want me to use it like a computer and idk why iOS locks down third party terminals so much.
It also sucks as a second monitor (why is everything monitor related so bad with Apple?). Keeps disconnecting, I need to restart Bluetooth/airdrop constantly to detect it, and the angle it sits at when sitting on my desk... really?
I really want to know what you guys use it for because mine just really feels like expensive ewaste.
The iPad mini is great for reading books (what I bought it for) and if you don't have an iPhone, any other iOS apps you want to run. I also use Chrome a lot for general web browsing.
Also. I inherited an older, full size iPad that I plan to leave on my piano for sheet music.
For reading I've honestly found e-ink way better. Not just on the eyes (neither blinded at night nor makes me squint if I'm outside or by a window) but the UI. The iPad gets the job done but it just feels like Apple doesn't want people to be using it that way and god Fitbit if you do something the non-Apple way.
For browsing the web, yeah I think my comment reflects that experience. But I won't go to places like HN because typing is just a shitshow on iOS. Don't get me started on swipe... and how is it 2026 and there isn't a universal gesture for back?
Idk, anyone with a remarkable browse the web? How is it? I'd get one in a heartbeat but that price is outrageous
Have owned a couple iPads starting ~2010 -- mainly for reading pdfs, and comics in electronic form. Occasionally drawing / jamming some tunes - almost all via 3rd party apps. There are still plenty of decent apps in the ecosystem, even though their eventual obsolescence is as good as built in, and a lot of stuff I previously loved the platform for has now been gone for years with no replacement. Native apps have never been great at pretty much anything, with a notable exception of Garage Band which is an absolute banger for its money. Books is... passable I guess?
But the reading pdfs part is important -- and really hard to beat for me, the iOS drag/scroll/pinch/zoom UX perceived responsiveness is still unmatched IMO. It would take some real creativity beyond liquid glass to enshittify this aspect out.
I find the last part really surprising. That seems, and feels (I do have an iPad), standard to me. But markup is, to put it lightly, fucking terrible.
I lean towards the iPad's success mostly being brand name and advertising because I've never experienced the "just works". I understand that from the non techie people, but not when talking to nerds
Disappointing to see 128 GB base storage. I thought they were done with that after all the iPhone 17 models got the bump to 256 GB.
what's a computer?
Can you run openclaw on it?
Heavier than the iPad Pro. Again. Still.
I know it's semantics, but Apple has never actually marketed their Air products as lighter than their Pro counterparts. The 11" variant is ~460g.
Are we meant to associate it with "hot air" marketing or what else?
What are you talking about? Air literally always meant thin and light. Now they're treating it a premium product between normal and pro instead (see iPhone Air too)
Yeah they should never have tried to copy "Air" from MacBooks, precisely where it meant thinnest/lightest, to the iPad/iPhone line where the products are already thin and light. That has always seemed like a bizarre branding move to me.
If they need a mid-tier brand between entry-level and Pro, just call it Plus. The iPad Plus would make a lot more sense.
FFS I cannot believe this. I went and looked it up, and you’re 100% right. It’s slight, but it’s real.
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Please do not buy any Apple products until Tim Cook takes that gold bar back from Trump? Thanks.
I don't understand the target audience of ipad air.
The base ipad is "really big iphone, with a few laptop-esque features". It's reasonably cheap for what it offers, especially if you want a highly mobile media consumption device and handwritten input.
Then there's ipad pro, which is wildly overpriced for its specs -- m4 pro has half!! the ram that the cheaper m4 macbook air has, which is laughable for a 'pro' anything, especially if you have apple intelligence enabled - you get what, 3GB of usable ram once you take OS and apple intelligence into account? Yet, aside from the crazy sticker price, the hardware is a lot better - the 120 Hz OLED display looks amazing and is way brighter, the speakers are quite an upgrage, full blown thunderbolt port for external display and so on. The OS is still toy-like, and ram is pitiful, but there is place for an ipad pro.
And then there's air which is... base ipad with an M-series chip and pretty much nothing else? The display is barely any better than base ipad, the storage and ram are pitiful, the speakers are from the baseline ipad and so on. Just about the only saving grace of the M4 one announced here is 12GB ram, which is the absolute lowest those really ought to have, and really puts into perspective how utterly miserly Apple was about ram pre-AI. I don't understand the value proposition - you want the baseline you buy a much cheaper base model, you want more you get the pro, right?
To be fair the asking price is far less than pro but the upgrades over base model seem so minuscule that I just don't know.
Larger screen option, much better screen, better pencil support - not better support, but a much better pencil (this is HUGE for my daughter for example).
It's crazy to me that someone can look at a $350 device and a $1000 device and say there's not room for something in the middle...
> I don't understand the target audience of ipad air.
For me — 13" laptop replacement with cellular connectivity.
If a 13" version of the base iPad existed, I'd probably get that, but as-is the iPad Air is the cheapest 13" iPad.
I live in Asia and I see all students using iPads instead of laptops. The limitations of the OS are really not felt by the general public. Whatever you listed doesn't even make sense to them, they buy things based on what they can afford. Every iPad works the same to them.
You're not wrong, but I hate the idea of an entire generation growing up without ever using a full powered computer. (Full powered is the wrong word, more like fully capable computer)
We have an entire generation who only knows how to interact with "usability optimized" interfaces with zero friction and zero learning curve.
Not knowing how to use a regular computer creates a barrier to entry for programming and other computing industries that didn’t exist before.
I get it, there's now definitely a hurdle between "I got a computing device" and "I can program on it". I don’t think it's a huge hurdle though, you can and will be able to upgrade or just buy a full computer when and if you encounter its limitations.
Your car can't compete in races, but it doesn't affect you because you're probably not interested in racing. You're more interested in comfort and price.
Manual vs. automatic is a better comparison.
Driving a manual isn’t a required life experience by any means. But the overwhelming majority of people who know how to drive manual appreciate the knowledge and experience. (And it’s not necessarily more expensive, if anything Apple products are typically more expensive)
Because it has a large screen and my wife uses it as her only computer and uses it with a regular $30 Bluetooth keyboard and mouse
It's the cheapest iPad that supports pressure sensitivity on the better apple pencil.
The Air has a better display (laminated, AR coating, P3 colors).
My kids (4 and 6) like to use the iPad Air with the pencil.
To me, the tablet form factor is dead with the arrival of the trifold.
90% of the people who use tablets I know (including myself) only has four use case: watching video, reading PDF and comics, taking notes, and playing mobile games.
All of which are very mobile-oriented tasks that are done on tablets solely for their screen sizes. With trifold bridging the gap between screen sizes and, more importantly, screen ratios, I would love to merge them into one device. This is in contrast with laptops, whose differences in OS and use cases are, to me, much bigger and necessary.
Of course, right now they are very much afar from consumers' pockets due to price and reliability. But normal foldables were once in the exact same state, and the fact that Apple is releasing one soon is a sure tale sign of the future of foldables.
I have a hard time justifying buying a trifold when my 13-inch iPad Pro was 1263€ and the Samsung trifold is probably gonna be closer to 3000€ for a 10-inch display. If I assume that it'll be 2999€, you can get a 13-inch iPad Pro (1519€), a Magic Keyboard for the iPad (399€), an iPhone 17 (999€) and still have money left over. And this is straight from Apple.com. It's possible to get better deals elsewhere.
A properly built tablet OS UI would also have those differences in the OS that make it more than just a larger phone screen, which so far seems to be most of what the foldables are doing with a gimmick thrown in here or there.
iPadOS may not fully be to the point of being an OS UI that really utilizes the benefits of a tablet sized device, but it does have elements that are unique to it that would not really make sense on a phone.
That being said, if your tablet use case really is just a larger phone than a foldable would be great. But i know for myself the way I use my iPad it would not be a suitable replacement. Especially not now, maybe in 5+ years once someone figures out how to make an OS that actually manages different ways of interacting with it in different form factors work, but that has yet to happen.
IMHO technology (and price) is just not there yet. I can buy a phone and 2 tablets for less month than a foldable.
I'd love a 10 inch screen in my pocket but maybe in 2035. Nokia imagined this 20 years ago and we're barely there yet.
I wouldn’t put too much hope into foldables, at least not because of Apple’s involvement. They also released the Vision Pro. And there’s still the unsolved(?) problem of the screens getting easily scratched/destroyed if they’re not heavily protected and kept clean. (There are some informative teardown videos, e.g. by JerryRigEverything.)
Dunno if Apple's foldable will support Apple Pencil. (For that matter, not sure a touchscreen MacBook would either.) That's one use case for a properly rigid, solid, flat surface.
I can get a foldable phone that extends to a 13 inch screen.
I’d rather have no moving parts in my screen.