Nobody is saying that the iPad is the most important computing device, but the fact is that there have been supply constraints since 2020. Apple has had to prioritize certain products over others for a while now. Despite this, iPad revenue was still decent.
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Apple Reports All-Time or March Quarter Revenue Records Across All Categories Except iPad
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I agree with your points and would add that 12.9" just isn't enough real estate for "replacing laptops."
iPad has less app support than iPhone and is more closed off than Mac. It literally inherits the worst of both worlds.
The apps on my iPhone are mostly limited to comunincaton, music/podcasts, maps, health and safari.
Any entertainment, streaming services, games and time burners sit on my iPad.
Work and important personal stuff gets done on my Mac.
Probably because with hardware it has now (2 years-ish ago) is really all it needs for what it's allowed to do. The kinds of tasks that would demand more, require near-desktop level interoperability between applications.
The iPad is being software limited. Until that changes, at the current price points, a MacBook or even a Windows tablet serve better in a lot of use cases.
This. There are currently way too many sizes and models of iPads. They are killing themselves with choice.
One cannot tell anything about the general public’s and overall iPad satisfaction rate by looking at the iPad forum of MR.
I know the new iPad mini was hard to get in variants with more than 64GB when it was released
You are right, coding on an iPad is limited. OTOH, I am not that interested in coding on my iPad or a small laptop. When I code, I prefer to sit at a desk and use a large desktop monitor (at least 27") or monitors and a mechanical keyboard. For everything else I do a 12.9" iPad Pro with the magic keyboard is fine. I can read and respond to email and chat, raise, review and merge pull requests. I can even remote into a desktop machine or cloud VM if absolutely necessary.
I have one of those somewhere in my house. The new ones are, I am sure, much better than the one I have. That said, I found my Surface Pro to be a poor laptop and a poor tablet. The problem is it runs Windows which has very few decent tablet apps and is almost unusable without a keyboard and trackpad. I found the keyboard and trackpad to be not very good, way too much flex on the keyboard and useless as an actual laptop. The Magic keyboard on the iPad is much better and completely optional.
Yeah, it’s like polling Windows users about the future of the Mac.
Doesn’t matter what anyone here says about the iPad, there are still more users buying iPads than Mac every day. And, by the end of the year, Apple will have sold more than twice as many iPads as Macs
It’s getting better. Swift Playgrounds finally has a full text editor. Entire apps can be designed on an iPad by leveraging Swift UI.
Hopefully Apple unlocks more features and relaxes the app sandboxing so we can use things like a native ZSH console, with full command line access to a partitioned file system.
What do you need a device to do? It’s weird there’s so much animosity towards iPadOS. My iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard + Apple Pencil 2 combo is incredibly useful and versatile. I’m not a creative type, I use it for browsing, email, Notability. I find iPadOS to be more than enough for that. Even the file system is great for my needs. I went with the 12.9 M1 model because I like the screen real estate and mini LED display. I also appreciate the increased RAM. I’ll keep mine for years and will likely replace it With another large iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard combo, and eventually replace my M1 MacBook Air with an iMac of some kind.
I would say that’s a subjective statement. I use my 12.9 M1 iPad Pro right next to my M1 MacBook Air all the time. The iPad Pro gets way more usage. I only use my M1 for exams which require macOS software. That’s not a limitation of the iPad, it’s that the exam makers don’t want to spend money developing software compatible with iPadOS.
I found the opposite experience, it's EASILY the best tablet out there, and a pretty decent laptop, but again just my opinion and my personal/business use case.
Windows runs quite well on a tablet, and has for some time now, it definitely is not unusable without a keyboard and trackpad. I'm not saying you, but I see this often and it just feels like hyperbole or simply that users didn't give it enough time to understand how things work. The keyboard/trackpad I won't argue with you there versus a full laptop, but again the entire purpose of something like the surface pro is that you don't have to carry a macbook AND an iPad around. I tried the Magic keyboard and found it a grossly overpriced joke, especially if trying to shoehorn an iPad into a laptop. Unwieldy, easily tottered, and heavy, it just wasn't for me.
Agree, i have the first gen Ipad Pro and my wife uses it to create drawings for her shirts and still works great. Two ipads in the household and i use hers to watch YouTube Videos while cooking.
Here’s my theory on this:
The pandemic pulled forward many years’ worth of demand for ipads due to the need for home-based schooling. This is why sales are lagging behind now. The people who wanted one have already gotten it. Not to mention that ipads have a higher chance of being a family device (ie: 1 ipad shared amongst multiple people) compared to a PC.
So a household may get 1 iphone and 1 Mac per family member, but maybe get only 1 ipad as the communal gaming device.
Meanwhile, the Mac was only recently updated with the M1 chip (and its variants), so we are seeing improved sales today due to pent up demand from upgraders.
I don’t think a lot of the naysaying about ipad sales slumping because it’s not as good as a PC really holds up to scrutiny. The answer is like far more straightforward.
The pandemic pulled forward many years’ worth of demand for ipads due to the need for home-based schooling. This is why sales are lagging behind now. The people who wanted one have already gotten it. Not to mention that ipads have a higher chance of being a family device (ie: 1 ipad shared amongst multiple people) compared to a PC.
So a household may get 1 iphone and 1 Mac per family member, but maybe get only 1 ipad as the communal gaming device.
Meanwhile, the Mac was only recently updated with the M1 chip (and its variants), so we are seeing improved sales today due to pent up demand from upgraders.
I don’t think a lot of the naysaying about ipad sales slumping because it’s not as good as a PC really holds up to scrutiny. The answer is like far more straightforward.
I sincerely doubt Apple is concerned in any way, shape or form about iPad sales. They’ll be a slight features adjustment to make a push later this year, but there’s also the obvious supply constraint. Almost every iPad is 5-6 weeks out in shipping. That‘s not likely to change throughout Q3 or Q4 either.
I feel some of the supposed animosity comes from people who feared that the iPad might threaten the long term future and viability of the Mac. I do believe that at one point, Apple did genuinely believe that the iPad could replace the Mac for a large number of its users, and the 2016-2018 period did indeed feel like Apple was no longer enthusiastic about the Mac, and losing touch with the needs of its pro users.
You had creators sharing about how their iPad Pros could export video on Lumafusion so much more quickly compared to FCP on Intel Macs, leading to a sore case of sour grapes. You had iPads getting shiny new features like Promotion and the Apple Pencil, while the MacBooks lost MagSafe, lost ports, lost their function row keys, and users had to contend with thermal throttling issues and crummy keys.
I think I get what Apple was trying to do, but I concede that it doesn't excuse the legitimate concerns that Mac users had during this period of time, and it seems to have devolved into a "iPad vs Mac" pissing match.
Consider what “replacing laptops” means. Also, do consider your particular situation to be standard across users or an outlier specific to your use? Theres no way I could effectively do court work (for example) on an iPad. The clipboard isn’t even robust enough to begin considering that. Glad it works for you though.
Your example is good reminder of the limits of working on multiple documents that is normal to encounter on a laptop, but torture to try with a iPad. There are indeed very workable examples that run on IPadOS, but multitasking and floating windows involving multiple applications with associated documents is far beyond its scope. iPads are being impacted by the very long battery life on M1 family based laptops. Also the use of large iPhones with say bringing up inventory or pricing information for business workers that is pocketable is damaging IPad viability.
Ok. It's still the same picture for the last 10 years. Why are there excuses this year?
The tablet is a less important, in-between product that is never going to become the dominant form of anything.