[giobox]

Emphasis on should here. In the "real world" with real family pressures a lot of the time good account hygene goes out the window. In my experience account sharing is rife on "kid" iPads, especially as many of them are often hand-me-down devices that people don't want to have to go through the pain of reinstalling everything again for a new user.

The ideal solution is iOS on iPad gets multiple user account support (like general purpose Macs and PCs have had for decades....), and you could just quickly throw on a new kid account, but Apple clearly like forcing you to buy one iPad per user account and reinstall everything every time it gets a new user - shared devices aren't as great for the company bottom line.

The sad thing is this support is largely there in the OS already built; its just locked to schools/businesses and is a PITA to setup for private owners:

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

Honestly, the lack of multiple user accounts is borderline criminal in my opinion, especially on the high spec expensive M1 iPad models that cost as much as a multi-user laptop.

[ehPReth]

I agree; it's really a shame that they don't have multi-user support unlocked for iPads with Family Sharing, especially for those with kids! It's right there and probably wouldn't take too many engineering resources..

I'd be worried that little Timmy would accidentally turn on photo sync or something for the adult's account and see... certain pictures he should not be seeing kinda-thing. Or iMessage and send something to someone. Though; if you're strict about the restrictions feature or guided access you should be safe?

[chrisfinazzo]

For the average person, they (Apple) probably feel like Family Sharing is the right mechanism to address these issues. Education and Business customers have Shared iPad because of the different environments they operate in where the use case is clear.

In a world where (generally speaking) people are expensive and hardware is cheap, Apple probably thinks each person having their own device is easier than trying to shuffle around - potentially - 1 TB home directories for each person.

We're getting closer, but storage and networks need to get even better before the majority of regular people can do this and will tolerate it, not just the power users.

[giobox]

> hardware is cheap

There is nothing cheap about iPads, especially the models that have the same M1 processors and similar pricepoints as a MacBook. It's laughable they don't have multiple user support today, and is solely to protect sales of the devices.

I'm genuinely surprised someone would defend this behaviour. Imagine you bought any other computer for north of 1000 dollars and you could only log one person in at a time - its unheard of, and was solved decades ago.

Again, iOS is already a multi-user OS - Apple just choose to artificially restrict how you can use it.

> potentially - 1 TB home directories for each person.

This is just being silly - people log families and many users into drives far smaller than this all the time.

[chrisfinazzo]

Everything is relative.

> There is nothing cheap about iPads, especially the models that have the same M1 processors and similar pricepoints as a MacBook. It's laughable they don't have multiple user support today, and is solely to protect sales of the devices.

Compared to the days when people had 1 machine (e.g, mainframes) and connected to it with comparatively dumb terminal devices, yes, hardware is cheap.

For a more recent example, I'll point out that the first computer I was reasonably involved with getting into our house was a Dell 4100 in the late 90's. At the time, it cost ~$1400, a not insignificant portion of that price attributable to a CD-RW.

In short, you probably couldn't really get anything below $1000 - given that baseline, I don't know how you could say things aren't cheap when we now have Chromebooks in Edu/Business which are at best $250-300.

At least publicly, Apple doesn't break out P&L for each product/division, although they do give sales numbers, so it's difficult to say if missing features which let them hit a price point have an impact.

> I'm genuinely surprised someone would defend this behaviour. Imagine you bought any other computer for north of 1000 dollars and you could only log one person in at a time - its unheard of, and was solved decades ago.

iOS/iPadOS still has UNIX underneath, so multiuser is definitely possible, even if it's not exposed in the GUI in all situations. Give it time.

> This is just being silly - people log families and many users into drives far smaller than this all the time.

My point about the size of home directories is colored by my own experience - for example, I don't use streaming music services and am a bit of a video hoarder - ask people with kids how big their photo libraries are and I think you'll be surprised how much the average person is carrying around with them.

[giobox]

> Give it time.

I'm sorry but I still find this hilarious. You can spend over 2k on an iPad that already has a cutting edge M2 CPU, the same CPU family that supports multiple users on every other non-iPad device, we are not waiting on anything here. Everything needed exists and has done so for decades.

Time is not required. A change to how Apple runs its iPad business is needed. This hasn't been a technical choice for a long time.

> yes, hardware is cheap.

You can buy an iPad in configurations up to 2500 dollars. For a single user computer. These are not cheap computers by any reasonable definition, given the amount of compute power you can buy for 1000 dollars elsewhere (including from Apple!).

> potentially - 1 TB home directories for each person.

> ask people with kids how big their photo libraries are and I think you'll be surprised how much the average person is carrying around with them.

Almost no kids have 1 TB iPads in my experience - they are far too expensive for children! Almost no adults have 1tb iPads given their cost as well really - it turns an iPad into a 4 figure device. But perhaps you think 1500 dollars + taxes is "cheap" for a single user computer with 1tb of storage too?

My final point - almost all of their competitors can do this today, often on much lower specification hardware too. Windows 11, Android and ChromeOS tablets all can have multiple user accounts, just like almost any other plain ole computer made in the last 20+ years.