Hacker News Reader

Comment by brianwillis | Hacker News Reader

My initial reaction to the iPad when it was first announced was that it needed user accounts. I mean, your smartphone is yours. No-one else is going to pick it up and use it for a few hours. But the iPad just intuitively seems like a device that's destined to live on the coffee table and be a family's shared machine. The software may "want" to be personal, but the hardware definitely doesn't.

There's really nothing stopping this happening from a technical standpoint. Have multiple "swipe to unlock" arrows on the lock screen, one for each user, labelled of course. Passwords on accounts if users so choose. Everyone gets their own apps, browser history/cookies/cache, music, movies, etc.

Where this gets tricky is when users of the same device want to share things. You shouldn't need to have two copies of the same movie on a device. I also have no idea how iTunes syncing would work.

View on HN

The iPad doesn't need user accounts... everyone in your family needs an iPad! :)

This sounds exactly like the kind of feature that Apple would carefully consider and ultimately reject because it doesn't match their vision. The ability to have user accounts is just one more feature that makes everything more complicated for the user.

The iPad shipped a year before the competition. Sure it doesn't have a multiuser operating system... it was based on smartphones. Apple faces engineering tradeoffs too. They shipped, they delivered, and they will add this if it makes sense when they can.

I have to agree with you. Apple won't saddle iOS with a stop-gap feature that won't be necessary in 5-10 years when iPads will be cheap enough that everyone will have their own.

I would bet that Apple has a lot data from Macs being brought in for repair and from new setups that would indicate that only a small percentage of users actually use more than one user account on their Macs.

I'd think that in the future your data foot-print won't be tied to any piece of hardware. With cloud storage solutions, you should be able to pick up any device and have it be immediately "yours" with your data and your settings. Hand the device over to your friend, and now it's got his data and settings.

The iPad might be a single-user device but I think the author here is wrong in thinking that's this a fundamental property of the hardware. It might be that the software isn't up to modern standards of multi-user access or it might be that the software to do this well hasn't even been invented yet. But it's a software issue and it's one that will eventually be solved (but maybe not by Apple).

"The iPad isn't something you pass around. It's not really designed to be a "resource" that many people take advantage of. It's designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated."

This sentence sums up my experience with my iPad, and its one of the main reasons I don't like it or use it much.

Apple is trying to sell more iPads. Why would they make them easier to share when people want them so badly?

There is a mod on Cydia enabling user accounts for the iPhone, not sure how it's implemented though.

Absolutely yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com