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 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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 have two iPad minis, but they're so unfriendly to use they exist only to display home assistant dasboards. It's overkill, but only because I thought they would be good for other things when I bought them.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

For me it would need vanilla linux or atleast MacOS.

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.

Let’s see how the cheap rumored MacBook will do. It’ll have user profiles

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.

How would you handle user switching? Would users have to go through a password screen to use anything?

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 am convinced they’ve done research that says they would sell a meaningfully smaller number of units if they added this feature. Sigh…

Android has this feature, even on phones where it barely makes sense

I was recently given an iPad Mini and I thought, great, I'll just set up a few profiles for the users around the office.

What?

Sometimes the culture shock from Android is just too much. You expect things to be there that simply are not.

I really agree with this. Right now I have a folder on my wife’s iPad Air 13 with Claude, brave, and other nerdy apps. This is totally a workaround for not having profiles/multi login.

I find this especially galling on the high-price configs, which essentially cost the same as well specified MacBooks. I am in the situation right now where I have 4 iPads in my home which could easily be replaced by 1 to 2 with support for multiple user accounts.

Apple have built much of the software infrastructure to support multiple users on iPadOS, the feature exists for education market customers etc:

> https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...

I also suspect someone at Apple has run the numbers on device sales and has decided the status quo where an iPad is a 1:1 device and makes more money for the company is preferable.

I was pretty surprised when the AppleTV of all things got multiple-user account login support before the iPad did!

I hope that the EU can legislate this kind of functionality into iOS devices.

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)

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.

wow, had no idea. that's honestly hilarious!