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Comment by guidedlight | Hacker News Reader

iPad isn’t doing very well. I wonder how they can fix that.

I think they need to give current iPad owners a reason to upgrade.

I use a pro from 2018 daily, but I don't think there's been a single improvement since then that would be meaningful to me.

The most obvious thing I can think of is let them run macOS, which would expand the use cases dramatically.

My mum uses a 2014 ipad air 2 and it still works perfectly fine and even still receives security updates. I don't think Apple needs you to be buying a new ipad every few years. Every time the device needs replacing, its a chance you might switch to Android and stop paying for their subscriptions and 30% cut.

The iPad is just one piece of the complete ecosystem. If they last forever without feeling obsolete, it builds a stronger brand.

Me too. The day a 1000 nit display comes out they can take my wallet.

They need to give people a compelling reason to upgrade. I stopped upgrading my iPad when the new features didn’t make it any better for media consumption and the basic apps I run on it. The cost to upgrade just isn’t justified by little incremental changes.

I gave up trying to use it as an alternative for doing work on travel - my workflow just doesn’t translate well to that device no matter how much I tried, so I just carry the bigger 16” laptop everywhere. They’d have to make some pretty big changes to the OS to win me over for work.

I think all the nannas just use smartphones now instead.

I love my iPad though, but I also own two macbooks and an iPhone and an android smartphone. I can't see any need to get another iPad for a few years. They're a brilliant device but their use case is a bit up in the air if you already have an iPhone and a MacBook.

It's funny to look back at all the chat circa 2010 about how tablets were going to replace personal computers. It just hasn't happened. For most people they're a third device after a smartphone and a laptop, or a device for kids.

Tablets have remained a niche market, but within that the iPad is doing fine.

It's not just iPads. I don't know a single person who uses tablets. Why bother with a tablet, if laptops could be as small and are also way better for productivity? MacOS is also far less restricted than IOS allowing you to do much more stuff on it.

> Why bother with a tablet

Honestly, because it’s nicer to use on a couch.

I decided several years ago that I’m not buying a new iPad until the OS supports multiple users and user switching. With the M series of chips and the amount of RAM and storage on the recent models, there is no reason to restrict it as a single user device except that Apple wants to.

iPad is a business roughly the same size as Mac. There's only so much we can complain about that.

And like others I like https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/08/charts-apple-q3-2023-resu... for an easy, smoothed out, look over a bunch of past quarters, and past AAPL cyclicality. Like others, if anything, I hope to see better results due to M1 / M2 processor performance.

I love my iPad as media consumption device, but the problem is that I only replaced it once so far. For video, even very old device works well (slow UI of the apps is a secondary concern).

I think it’s hard to fix this. It’s just a device that imo most people don’t need to replace that often, compared to phones (where by how you use them, you want more speed) or laptops (that are mostly used for work nowadays, so you also want it to work well).

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