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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At that point, an actual laptop is simpler.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
They’re pretty aware they’d be cannibalizing their lower-end laptop lineup.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
How many TVs do you have in your living area?
Today, we just have on each and have to run around the house whenever we want 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.
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 ...
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.
What problems do you see with multiple users on macOS? I don't use it intensively, but I've never noticed issues.
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.
I actually don't know if Windows or ChromeOS support this either but this is certainly something Linux can with LUKS et. al.
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.
Here's an early one I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJKRgs2IUg4&t=7s ("18 years ago")
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.
As a consumer, I don't care whose fault it is that profiles are useless.
There are some apps that get this right. Infuse recently added support for this.
and the end user can blame Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, YouTube, etc for not delivering the best experience for their customers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
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.
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 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”.
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
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...
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:
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.
You just have to turn it on with a MDM profile. It's just consumers they don't let use it.
And yes, it's existed for years now. That ordinary consumers can't have it is a business choice, not a technical limitation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It would solve the age verification challenge by tying a device to a person. Since they can, I think they might.
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 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.
If a company is hostile against its users, then walk away and don't look back.
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!
What?
Sometimes the culture shock from Android is just too much. You expect things to be there that simply are not.