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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
For fun (it was very much NOT FUN), I tried using an iPad as a daily driver for 3 weeks before I gave up.
The form factor was fine after I added the above case.
Should I ever need to treat PoWs to a special kind of undiscovered punishment, I know exactly what needs to be done:
The software and window manager are terrrrrrrrible. Trying to navigate back-and-forth between Slack and VSCode (through Safari, also painful) was, I discovered, a new method of torture. Add iSH (linux shell) to run things like ssh/mysql/kubectl, and you feel your soul leaving your body in real time.
Nothing tied together. Trying to do a "simple" desktop-like activity, such as, download a file from Slack and use `scp` to upload it to an ssh server. That's a 3-second job on a real computer. That's a 30-minute exercise in ripping your hair out on an iPad.
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”
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 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.
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.
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.
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…
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?
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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Hold down the command ⌘ key to view all available shortcuts for the app you’re currently using, and use Fn-m or globe key -m to see a list of all available system shortcuts.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I’m pretty sure iPadOS supports multiple profiles on Classroom[0] devices.
[0]: https://www.apple.com/education/k12/teaching-tools/
I wonder if something like that is in the works, given touch screen capability coming to Macs, and Tahoe being geared for touch UX...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJYY4MRN
For fun (it was very much NOT FUN), I tried using an iPad as a daily driver for 3 weeks before I gave up.
The form factor was fine after I added the above case.
Should I ever need to treat PoWs to a special kind of undiscovered punishment, I know exactly what needs to be done:
The software and window manager are terrrrrrrrible. Trying to navigate back-and-forth between Slack and VSCode (through Safari, also painful) was, I discovered, a new method of torture. Add iSH (linux shell) to run things like ssh/mysql/kubectl, and you feel your soul leaving your body in real time.
Nothing tied together. Trying to do a "simple" desktop-like activity, such as, download a file from Slack and use `scp` to upload it to an ssh server. That's a 3-second job on a real computer. That's a 30-minute exercise in ripping your hair out on an iPad.
I've seen people use their (non-Apple) tablet in the kitchen for recipes. Can't imagine taking my laptop to the kitchen.
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”
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 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 think they just don't know about the Magic Keyboard.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly - any USB mouse via the USB-C connector (or lightning camera adapter before that) works. External displays also work via USB-C.
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.
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.
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…
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?
I can tell you aren’t optimizing for illustration or 3D drafting. It’s absolutely amazing.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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?
How many phones do you have per person?
TVs are traditionally a shared experience. But even still, I have 2 TVs for every person in my household.
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 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.
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 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.
For me it would need vanilla linux or atleast MacOS.
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.
"... 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 ...
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.
Apple wouldn't approve a consumer focused MDM provider.
Apple doesn't approve MDM providers in the first place.
They can, and have, revoked certificates for arbitrary reasons.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
It's not the end user's problem whose fault it is.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Let’s see how the cheap rumored MacBook will do. It’ll have user profiles
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.
I hope that the EU can legislate this kind of functionality into iOS devices.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Fingerprint?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
wow, had no idea. that's honestly hilarious!
Android has this feature, even on phones where it barely makes sense
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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.)
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.
The “point” is very far in the past though. My 2016 ipad still working great for anything online.
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.
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 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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Same here. Sucks that Netflix is no longer supported but YouTube works great.
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.
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.
Yeah same here, stuck on the 2018 one coz its still great.
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.
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 why we need regulations on the subject.
No, we really don’t. Perhaps regulations on recycling, but punishing poorer people who can’t afford an iPad isn’t the answer.
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.
I have an iPad 4 that is now a single purpose scorekeeper for darts
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
Remember, the reason the iPad doesn't do Steam is because Apple won't let it. It is perfectly capable otherwise.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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
People complained when apple doesn't do spec bumps back in the intel era when their computers were getting legitimately clapped.
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.
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?
Because people will buy it.
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.
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?
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
ipad is one of those devices that doesn't need to exist, along with apple watch.
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.
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?
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?
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/
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At least they are not using "affordability"
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.
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 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...
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.
After having tried Firefox with UBO on Android, I can’t say I noticed any difference compared to Orion on iOS.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hold down the command ⌘ key to view all available shortcuts for the app you’re currently using, and use Fn-m or globe key -m to see a list of all available 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?
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
:(
Is it fast enough to run Liquid glass?
That's very funny. Bravo.
Was I the only stunned by the quality of the video ad? It’s really advert at its peak, to the point yet artistic.
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.
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.
ok
I wonder how well local inference would work on these.
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
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.
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
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?
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"
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 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.
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.
what's a computer?
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 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 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?
Bet they were hoping for a quieter news week for these announcements.
Can you run openclaw on it?
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.
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).
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.
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.
feflefkwekwflry
e2
Please do not buy any Apple products until Tim Cook takes that gold bar back from Trump? Thanks.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
I can get a foldable phone that extends to a 13 inch screen.
I’d rather have no moving parts in my screen.
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.
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.