Comment by moolcool
6 hours ago
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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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”
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
> 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.
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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 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.
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.)
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Do you mount it on a stand? my neck hurts just thinking about going through a full workday on an ipad.
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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.
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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 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 just picked up a new iPad with A16 chip for roughly $300 - sure they aren't M-series level but it's plenty fast for all of my day-to-day tasks, with good battery life and 3rd party keyboard/case/pen for another $60 and it functions like a laptop when I need a laptop.
They _are already_ PC replacements for many of the people who buy them.
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.
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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 think people want multi-user because most people still need their laptops for work (or hobbies sometimes). Otherwise, I'd be on my phone (for casual messaging, media consumption). iPad is mostly just sitting around most of time, so it can be quite easily shared b/w people in same household.
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.
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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.
"... 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 ...
Apple wouldn't approve a consumer focused MDM provider.
Apple doesn't approve MDM providers in the first place.
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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 soon as I added a 2nd user, my Samba share totally broke and days later I still don't have it working. It was fine for over a year and now I'm close to deleting my 2nd user just so I can access my Mac Mini across the network again.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
"Fast user switching" has been a feature since OS X 10.5 Leopard. It kind of requires an instructional video though.
Here's an early one I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJKRgs2IUg4&t=7s ("18 years ago")
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.
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.
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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.
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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...
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'm interested in the opposite direction too. If the iPad could do real phone calls and sms, I would ditch mobile phones. In the process I'd hope to reduce some screen time. I could live with Pod+Pad+Watch, but I doubt they'd ever make that happen :(
It's insane to me that Apple TV has this feature and iPad still doesn't.
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.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/deployment/dep9a34c2ba...
> 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.
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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.
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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 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.
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.
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.
I use my 13” iPad Pro M4 almost as much as my MacBook Pro. I’m typing this on it right now. It is by far more comfortable for consuming any kind of media than a laptop.
If I’m researching something and I need to read any significant amount of text I’m going to grab my iPad and find a comfortable spot instead of sitting at my desk. Even though I have 2 big monitors.
I also have a Magic Keyboard that I can simply pop on if I need to write any significant amount, like this, and pop it off again for pure consumption.
It’s an amazing device for watching video (the tandem OLED looks incredible) and I often use the pencil to sketch out ideas.
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.
For me it would need vanilla linux or atleast MacOS.
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?
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?
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.
my youngest uses our iPad. My wife and I have iPhones and MacBooks and never see the need to use an iPad (I much prefer keyboard input, I like to read paper books and I don't play games; I prefer watching movies on the laptop too). Our teen has a phone, does everything on there, and wouldn't use the iPad either, + laptop for school and some entertainment.
I hope that the EU can legislate this kind of functionality into iOS devices.
Android has this feature, even on phones where it barely makes sense
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.
wow, had no idea. that's honestly hilarious!
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 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.
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.