The iPad Pro at 10: a Decade of Unrealized Potential (theverge.com) 59
The iPad Pro went on sale ten years ago, launching with a 12.9-inch screen that Apple believed would redefine computing through size alone. The company initially resisted making the device a laptop replacement and maintained strict limitations on multitasking, browser capabilities, and app installation. Over the past decade, Apple reversed course. The iPad Pro gained USB-C ports, external drive support, keyboard and trackpad accessories, and an improved Files app.
The current M5 model includes OLED screens in 13- and 11-inch sizes. iPadOS 26 added free-form multitasking, a menu bar and the Preview app. The webcam now sits in landscape orientation. Despite these advances, the device remains constrained by App Store-only software installation, The Verge writes, limited system access, and the absence of desktop-class browsers. Apple spent years positioning the iPad as a third category between phones and computers. The hardware and accessories now support full computer functionality, but artificial software limitations remain in place.
The current M5 model includes OLED screens in 13- and 11-inch sizes. iPadOS 26 added free-form multitasking, a menu bar and the Preview app. The webcam now sits in landscape orientation. Despite these advances, the device remains constrained by App Store-only software installation, The Verge writes, limited system access, and the absence of desktop-class browsers. Apple spent years positioning the iPad as a third category between phones and computers. The hardware and accessories now support full computer functionality, but artificial software limitations remain in place.
Maybe a IPad iPillowCase will help (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Maybe a IPad iPillowCase will help (Score:5, Funny)
Apple way or the highway (Score:5, Insightful)
Fun fact, the first iPhones actually had an FM radio built in (as part of the WiFi Bluetooth gsm combo if memory serves), but this wasn't considered a desirable feature, so although practically all parts were present (yes, solutions without external antenna existed already, no headset required) the functionality wasn't made available to users.
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A convertible macbook air might be kinda cool but it's something other companies keep doing and have been striking out since i dunno at least the late 90s. I wouldn't be shocked at all to learn apple has a closet full of prototypes but to launch something like that "the apple way" they need to deliver something that makes all the predecessors look the way windowsCE and palm devices looked after the launch of the iphone.
and that's hard to do.
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Maybe you're right but, "don't release a product unless it revolutionizes the market", doesn't seem like a sound business
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Maybe you're right but, "don't release a product unless it revolutionizes the market", doesn't seem like a sound business practice
I guess there are a bunch of apple products that are more like accessories but i think they're very careful about the core components of the apple ecosystem, laptops, phones, and tablets. Its probably not a strategy for every business but in apple's case it gives them a reputation that lets them print money and act like every other little thing that they do is a huge deal even when it's dumb.
It's such an enviable position that the squarest MBAs in the world all started pretending to be steve jobs and for a
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Apple has also made it clear that they never intend to put touch functionality on the Macs. So I'm not sure how useful it being "convertible" will be. If you duct tape an iPad to a Macbook and remote screen share...
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Another thing I won't do is duct tape a tablet to a laptop. That's just plain stupid, I'm sorry. You'll be retaping it every other day. Use actual glue.
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It sounds like the author wants a convertible MacBook, not a tablet.
There were a LOT of people when the iPad Pro launched that thought it was going to be the crossover device they had long waited for, that perfect match of iPad and MacBook. It didn't really happen, and too many are still clinging to their disappointment. I think the only folks that were truly happy with their iPad Pro were artists that liked it after the Apple Pencil and programs like ProCreate came around. Everyone else either finds it a little too crippled to be useful, or way more than they need for doin
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I have an iPad that I was given at my old job. Never really found any use for it at work.
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Unrealised potential how? It does what Apple wants it to do. This is the Apple way. Look elsewhere if you don't want to be impacted by this mentality.
We do look elsewhere. There's just not anything else on the market that has any real potential, either.
iPad could have been the laptop killer. Instead, the iPad peaked back in 2013, and sales have been pretty steadily declining since then. The problem is in part that the only thing they are really good at is media consumption, and once people buy one, they don't ever need to replace it, because the new ones aren't meaningfully better for that purpose.
And when they do replace them, they often end up buyin
Re:Apple way or the highway (Score:5, Informative)
More the point, when it came time to find a tablet for use on my electronic organ, the iPad Pro wasn't even a serious consideration. To use it for that would have been a minimum of $1300 for one, and would have likely meant wanting to have two side by side, for a whopping $2600, and trying to figure out a way to control them both simultaneously would have also been infeasible.
Instead, I bought an Android tablet for $450 that is big enough to show two pages at once, controlled by BTLE buttons in the piston bar and USB foot switches mounted for easy knee control. The extent to which Android works better than iPad for that purpose was jaw-dropping.
And if and when I decide that I need a more portable tablet for reading sheet music and my choice is between a $1300 iPad Pro and a $199 13-inch Android tablet from Walmart, you can safely assume I will buy the latter as well. Why? Because it's a single-purpose device, and an iPad provides no obvious second purpose that isn't already fulfilled WAY better by my laptop. I can run 100% of the software that I need to run on my laptop. I can run 5% of the software that I need to run on an iPad.
The iPad Pro, as currently designed, is a waste of money for most users, and cannot fill any large enough niche for a majority of users to justify its price point, with the possible exception of people who use a computer only for browsing the web. And truthfully, most of them don't want to pay the price of a good laptop for something that's only a half-a**ed toy by comparison, but at least they *could*.
Yeah, Apple missed the mark. Very badly. And we've been saying it for more than a decade.
At this point, it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that they should have made limited use of all Mac apps possible on iPadOS, and also made it easy to write apps that mix UIKit and AppKit views arbitrarily, so that Mac apps can be converted to UIKit a piece at a time, adding gesture-based controls and floating button palettes and other approaches for making the app usable on iPadOS without a mouse, while still using the rendering code for their complex views and stuff, rather than forcing app developers to completely rewrite their user interfaces from scratch for iOS.
And at this point, it should be obvious to anyone with the slightest clue that not having support for 100% of Mac apps makes iPad Pro unusable as a laptop replacement for a majority of users. The folks who could switch mostly already have, but the problem is that the vast majority of users have a few apps that they run that don't work on iOS, and they are *different* apps, so you can't even point at a few dozen or even a few hundred apps and apply pressure on them to convert their apps and make major headway.
Open up iPad Pro or delete one digit from the price point. Those are the only two options that would make it a real contender in the market, IMO.
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You know you can buy a new iPad for $349 right? You don’t need the Pro version for you use case.
My eyes are not 22 years old anymore. So yeah, I really do need the Pro version.
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There is a 13" iPad Air. I have the M2 versions of both the Air and Pro. Differences are that pro has a better screen, pro has face-ID and Air has touch ID, and really, that's it.
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Nice to know. It's still $800, and 13-inch Android tablets still start at $190 if you don't mind Android 14. So the Air is only as expensive as 4 bare bones Android tablets instead of 7. It's still massively overpriced if your CPU requirements are minimal.
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Just a thought... you could get a portable monitor, which are regularly available for around $50 for a 15.6" one, and pair it with a cheap mini pc or even a RaspberryPi. The Pi would even have the advantage of having GPIO pins so you could add buttons easily and cheaply. Since it's just going to be sat on your organ, I suspect it'd be fine to plug it in somewhere, but you could run it off a cheap battery pack if need be. A bit more setup work, but the result would likely be better than any tablet for your p
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Just a thought... you could get a portable monitor, which are regularly available for around $50 for a 15.6" one, and pair it with a cheap mini pc or even a RaspberryPi. The Pi would even have the advantage of having GPIO pins so you could add buttons easily and cheaply. Since it's just going to be sat on your organ, I suspect it'd be fine to plug it in somewhere, but you could run it off a cheap battery pack if need be. A bit more setup work, but the result would likely be better than any tablet for your purposes.
You're off by a lot. My setup shows two pages at once, which means it's a 26-inch Android tablet (IIRC).
So even before the cables, you're at about $370 plus shipping, which is really close to the $400-ish price o
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Wait... you have a 26" android tablet?!? You referenced the largest iPad Pro, at 13", was even smaller than you'd like. How do you jump up to 26"? Maybe you're using two of them?
If you're using two of them, that's not a 26" screen - it's two 13" screens (which is approximately half the area of a 26" screen, cause that measurement is a diagonal). In that case, get two portable monitors, and they'd be even bigger!
The RaspberryPi 5 2gb is $50 and supports dual 4k displays. I don't see why you'd need integrated
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Wait... you have a 26" android tablet?!? You referenced the largest iPad Pro, at 13", was even smaller than you'd like. How do you jump up to 26"? Maybe you're using two of them?
Yeah, you missed the part where I said that doing it with an iPad would be impractical because you'd have to find a way to synchronize two of them. :-)
If you're using two of them, that's not a 26" screen - it's two 13" screens (which is approximately half the area of a 26" screen, cause that measurement is a diagonal).
Sorry, slightly off. I think it's actually 24". It's about the size of two 8.5x11 sheets of paper, and it is widescreen aspect ratio, so it ends up being pretty much the same size as two 13" iPad Pro tablets side by side, with a little extra unused width.
I don't see why you'd need integrated storage, nor why that would be much more reliable, especially when you're comparing it to cheap Android tablets. Just use a microsd card in it, and get a spare one to keep a copy of it all.
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Guess I also overlooked the use case - pro use, traveling, concerts... I was thinking just a static home setup.
Dunno if I agree on the micro-sd card issue. There's loads of ways around that (boot from microsd, data elsewhere; or just boot from a USB hard drive), and I wouldn't trust the storage in a cheap android tablet over good microsd cards. Also, you could actually carry spares of the microsd card with everything loaded and ready to go on it, whereas the tablet option may mean carrying extra tablets...
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The ipad has largely been a laptop killer for me as my casual computing device.
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The ipad has largely been a laptop killer for me as my casual computing device.
And I'm guessing you still did not spring for the iPad Pro.
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No I have the ipad pro.
I want a locked down tablet! (Score:1)
Not a joke. A younger me would reel with disgust to learn that I don't want to install linux on them and configure it into a tiny beowulf cluster.
But I have a PC, some small servers, an aws account, and a drawer full of SBC computers and old android cell phones. My Apple devices serve as locked down appliances that I don't have to fuck with and that apparently offer enough privacy features to upset Google and Facebook and if I need more than that I have many ways to get it.
I will say that apple silicon is
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100% ditto! My big workstation makes any laptop I use seem cramped for WORK work, so everything else is used a lot less. I've found a convertible chromebook to be a nice companion for odds and ends, like pulling up a recipe in the kitchen, or the occasional video meeting. The drawer full of old Android phones is depressing - really wish I did more with them.
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It does what Apple wants it to do.
Yep, that is unrealised potential. Apple being the limiting factor is what the entire story is about.
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Unrealized... hardly. (Score:5, Insightful)
I worked in a public school district and fought tooth and nail against iPad adoption for exactly the lack of features the iPad Pro now, mostly supports. When the educators and administrators were asked how the iPads were actually going to be used, managed, stored, powered, paid for etc. it mostly fell apart.
Apple wants and wanted users to buy their premium brand tablets, iPads, and cousume services and apps with monthly recurring revenue.
1. External storage = reduced iCloud revenue
2. USB port = reduced accessory and compatability licensing revenue
3. Enterprise App installations = reduced App Store revenue
4. Advanced browser capabilities = reduced App Store revenue
5. Multitasking = probably takes a bit more powerful hardware, costing more
6. User profiles = fewer iPads sold
All of this contributes to making it difficult and painful, if not impossible, to not use the Apple ecosystem after purchasing the hardware.
The Jones' and their ilk, gobbled them up regardless.
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Or just upgrade to a Motorola 68000. A 7.14MHz 68000 is plenty powerful enough for multitasking.
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The locked down ecosystem makes it far harder to screw up your system and for the target demographic simplicity is the key selling point. Sometimes less really is more for a lot of people.
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If you want a more flexible tablet, Apple doesn't make them, but they exist.
Android has tablets, and if you wanted a tablet laptop, they exist as well.
The problem is, they just don't work as well, which is why Android tablets are limited to either Samsung or Temu specials nowadays. And convertibles exist but always seemed awkward to use - probably Windows' fault but goes to show perhaps the demand isn't there.
The iPad is 15 years old now, if some tablet concept was the hot thing, the last 10 years of the iP
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No, I'm saying the article calling the potential "unrealized" is bunk. Apple knew full well what the iPad could be used for and crippled it... I mean designed it in Cupertino... for a closed ecosystem to reduce support calls and keep it in it's walled garden to drive revenue and profit.
I'm sure both avenues were very apparent, flexible hardware or closed ecosystem. Apple sees more money in the closed ecosystem. If the walled garden is so valuable, why did Apple ever allow iTunes on Windows devices? Answ
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Sure, but you don't need an M5 chip for that.
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5. Multitasking = probably takes a bit more powerful hardware, costing more
Phones and tablets have supported rudimentary multitasking from the beginning. Some 15 years ago both iOS and Android introduced features to keep multiple apps active and running even if they weren't displaying anything. Split screening multiple apps were introduced on Android 7.0 in 2016.
There's nothing in the hardware preventing this. By the way iPadOS 26 introduced a full window manager.
Uncanny (Score:2)
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And neither is good when your hands are full doing other tasks. I'd love to see you do the dishes with one hand while holding your iPad or iPhone with the other, all the while watching videos on a tiny screen rather than paying attention to what you are doing.
These are the standards of iPad users.
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And neither is good when your hands are full doing other tasks. I'd love to see you do the dishes with one hand while holding your iPad or iPhone with the other, all the while watching videos on a tiny screen rather than paying attention to what you are doing.
1) Ummm what? You know they make these things called ”stands" these days? Some of them are built into cases. 2) You do know the point of "podcasts" is to listen to them and not watch them, right?
These are the standards of iPad users.
The problem seems to be you do not understand how technology works. So let me explain how I use my iPad. Before washing the dishes, I put on a podcast and play it on the speakers. My hands are free to do dishes. If I am watching something, I flip the case so the iPad is standing at angle, and I position it w
Re: Uncanny (Score:2)
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The biggest problem with Apple for users probably isn't any of their anticompetitive shit, but rather their bifurcated OS. Software which could be sold on both platforms is commonly only on one or the other. Tablets have enough screen and enough power to do real PC jobs but are prohibited from doing them because Apple wants to sell you both an iPad and a Macintosh. Android-based tablets can run emulators to get around these problems, or run full apps which can run on ARM Linux in Termux or another solution.
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"...but rather their bifurcated OS..."
Apple created the different OSes for different use cases that, Apple thought, required different user interfaces. They sustain it for this reason.
"...but are prohibited from doing them because Apple wants to sell you both an iPad and a Macintosh."
No. Apple maintains different user interfaces for different use cases, it is the touch vs. mouse UIs, the large vs. small screens, that drive the differentiation. I'm not even convinced Apple cares to sell you a Mac anymore,
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Apple created the different OSes for different use cases that, Apple thought, required different user interfaces.
There is no reason why applications which choose to implement both types of interfaces can't do so. There's also no reason why users should be limited to one type of interface or the other. Both things coexist completely peacefully on Android. You can connect a mouse to your tablet (or even phone) and treat it like a desktop system with shitty storage (practically all phones, it takes a lot of power to have fast storage.)
People forget that tablet computers existed a decade before the iPad, it's good for certain things but creation is NOT one of them.
The primary use case for tablet computers in olden times was data entry and acquisition
Got me me of the new M5s (Score:2)
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Does the author know what a tablet is? (Score:2)
Apple spent years positioning the iPad as a third category between phones and computers.
This is what a tablet is. Bigger than a phone but not quite a laptop or desktop. There are use cases for this. In my house they are basically portable streaming devices. Someone is watching their show on the living room TV, grab the iPad/tablet and watch your show in your room.
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This is what a tablet is. Bigger than a phone but not quite a laptop or desktop. There are use cases for this. In my house they are basically portable streaming devices. Someone is watching their show on the living room TV, grab the iPad/tablet and watch your show in your room.
The problem is that an iPad Pro is mostly only useful as a portable streaming device, but costs as much as a laptop ($1300). Meanwhile, you can get an Android tablet of similar size for under $200, which is about what one would reasonably expect to pay for a portable streaming device that is going to get mistreated by your kids and eventually broken.
The product just doesn't make sense at its price point.
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Agreed, the tablet is 90% a thin client with some local capability. I think of the unnecessarily fast cpu as a luxury accommodation and light future proofing as opposed to wasted potential.
I have played heavy games and AI on my aging-but-still-fast ipad. It's neat but anything that takes advantage of the power like that, at least on my model, sucks battery hard and makes it hot as fuck.
The selling point is the screen. (Score:5, Informative)
I bought an iPad Pro last year for the screen. I didn't care about storage or the M4 CPU, because there's almost no software for the iOS that benefits from the CPU or storage space. What I bought it for was the screen. I'm a designer and I wanted something to draw on. The big, high quality screen combined with an Apple pencil is great for that. It replaces all the pencils, pens, markers, and paper I would otherwise need. For artists and designers who spend hours a day drawing the iPad Pro will pay for itself by replacing those art supplies. If I want to sit on the couch and draw the iPad Pro is awesome. The same goes for traveling. Everyone I know with an iPad Pro bought it for the same reasons.
All that said, what I really love it for is reading The Economist without having to sit at my desk. A big tablet is perfect for that app. And I believe that if Apple sold an iPad with a cheap CPU and the same screen nobody would buy an iPad Pro.
Can it run Mac OS yet? (Score:1)
Nobody wants your shitty iOS. People tolerate it on phones, because you taught them that it's ok for PCs to suck if they fit in one hand. But once the one hand constraint is lifted, people come back to their senses for some weird reason. You did too good a job of persuading people to treat phones as weird exceptions to common sense, when you should have undermined common sense itself (but that would have harmed Mac sales).
SuperKendall, where are you? (Score:2)
SuperKendall told us all how the iPad was the ideal platform for content creation, and he would know because he was a professional photographer! So what's the problem?
Yes this (Score:2)
I agree with this 100%. A few years ago I used a grant to get a powerful ipad pro, thinking I could use it for work on the commute. Nope. Turns out it's just a boob tube. Was totally useless to me.
Find I use the iPad Pro far more than the MacBook (Score:2)
The MacBook basically never leaves my desk, plugged into a 38 inch screen. It’s used for coding (iframe-resizer.com) and occasionally when I have a task that needs a larger screen.
If you wish the iPad was a Mac, you should just by a Mac. For everyone else the constr
I’m still waiting for my Apple Watch Pro (Score:2)
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I want a watch, or maybe even a ring, I can take off and set down that projects a screen or 3d hologram and virtual keyboard.
I don't see that format working until we have actual hologram technology. The vast, vast majority of places where I've used my smartphone and tablet in recent memory wouldn't have had suitable surfaces to project the screen or keyboard onto.
If a non-hologram projector does work for your use case, we'd still need massive improvements in battery technology. What you're describing seems analogous to a Nebula Capsule 3. It only gets 2.5hrs of battery life, and is much, much chunkier than a smartphone let a