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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

iPadOS’s Safari user agent identifies itself as macOS, that’s why. Prior to iPadOS it did contain the string iPad; that was removed. So it can’t tell if it’s an iPad or a Mac with a small vertical screen, although a human would consider the former more likely.

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And that’s why so many kids had trouble registering their iPad on our network. As it would not send the mobile registration to the iPads

<sigh@Apple>

Don’t know about your particular problem, but I’m pretty sure it was largely a response to iPads being sent to mobile sites with horrible usability thanks to navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone|iPad|iPod/) or the server-side equivalent. The problem was amplified by the release of the 12.9’’ iPad Pro, so self-identifying as a Mac made sense.

Its not a Mac though. I'd much prefer Apple use the User Agent correctly rather than hack around it like that.

The system we used did use user agents to identify mobile devices or computers. And gave the iPad users a terrible experience because Apple lied.

User agent strings are fundamentally a hack though. They all identify themselves as Mozilla!

Well I’m glad Apple prioritizes us over you the. I don’t care that you want it a different way. Apple forcing the end of bad practices in this instance is a win.

It's not an iPad or Apple issue if your registration system is using the User-Agent for weird reasons.

Sure it does, but Apple should be sending the correct User Agent string, not making one up.

Browsers have been lying about their identities via their user agent strings since 1995.

As far as my Chromium is concerned, it identifies as a...: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

The only thing it doesn't identify as is Internet Explorer.

(Yes it's an old version, no I will update when I feel like it. Shush.)

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