The iPad’s back, baby! Or is it?

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

Return of the king

So it turns out that reports of the iPad’s death were greatly exaggerated. In Apple’s latest financial report, overall revenue was surprisingly strong, not because of any particular successes among the iPhone, Mac, and Wearables departments (all of which were essentially flat year-on-year) but thanks to a sizeable improvement from Services and a giant 24 percent improvement from the iPad.

Where did we go wrong, then, we skeptical iPad doom-mongers and naysayers? We told the world that the iPad range was confusing and then even more confusing. We claimed Apple had no idea what to do with the iPad. We thought the 2024 Air was an awkward middle child whose only purpose was to make other models look more appealing by comparison. And we opined that even the impossibly great M4 iPad Pro was held back from being a hit by the failings of iPadOS. Is it time for a heaped serving of humble pie?

Of course not. Pundits are never wrong. They just haven’t explained themselves properly.

So, first up: these numbers are good for Apple, but they’re not representative of some brave new dawn for the iPad. The company didn’t release any new iPads for the entirety of 2023 (the first time it’s done that across a calendar year since the first iPad came out in 2010) which means demand was bottled up.

People might be holding on to their iPads for longer than in the past because old models do everything they need and new models are rarely exciting, but it’s not like upgrade demand collapsed to zero. If you wait for long enough, you’ll have amassed a decent group of people who’d like to buy a new iPad if and when one comes out. (That isn’t a good long-term strategy, by the way; as time passed and no new Apple models appeared, that group will have bled out a small but significant number of frustrated switchers to Microsoft and Android.) Sure enough, when Apple released new Air and Pro models and dropped the price of the 10th-gen iPad, units shifted. Big surprise. Let’s see if that continues into the next quarter.

Second, the problems we talked about haven’t gone away. On the macro scale, tablets simply never took off in the way we hoped: customers just didn’t go for it in big enough numbers as a serious, productive form factor. (I have to stress the “in big enough numbers” part because every time I write about this I get emails from people who work entirely on an iPad. Good luck to those people, but there aren’t enough of you for Apple’s liking.) Consumers like the idea of an instant-booting medium-screen portable for media consumption on the sofa, but that isn’t a context where you need to upgrade the hardware frequently. For work, people continue to use a smartphone and a laptop. That might change at some point, but it hasn’t yet.

Specifically to Apple, iPadOS remains a problem—maybe the problem. If it was better for multitasking, the iPad would have wider appeal as a laptop replacement. If it got features ahead of iOS, or even at the same time, Apple could more convincingly claim the iPad was a priority rather than a pale shadow of the iPhone. The difficulty is that complexity is not what the iPad’s main current market wants… which might mean it’s time to branch off the operating systems once again and make one for the standard iPad and iPad mini, and another for the Air and Pro.

I’m very fond of the iPad and took no pleasure in its struggles over the past few years. I’d love for Apple to get it right. But it hasn’t done so yet, and a temporary sales bump isn’t going to convince me otherwise.

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Podcast of the week

On this episode of the Macworld Podcast, we’re having an airing of grievances—what are some things we wish Apple would pay attention to? Tune in and find out!

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

Reviews corner

Best games for Mac: A-list games you can play on your Mac.

Best iPad keyboards: Turn your iPad into a MacBook replacement.

The rumor mill

We just got our first look at the iPhone 16 and Apple finally got the colors right.

Apple just leaked a bunch of upcoming iPhones, Macs, and iPads.

Apple eyes ads on Apple TV+, report claims.

The iPhone 16 might not arrive with Apple Intelligence.

Software updates, bugs, and problems

You really really really need to update your Mac. Like really.

‘Crazy Evil’ Mac malware poses as Loom, other popular apps to steal Bitcoin.

iOS 17.6 is now available with bug fixes and security improvements.

Elon Musk’s X team remembers the Mac exists, proceeds to kill the Twitter app.

iOS 18.1 beta is available early to test Apple Intelligence features.

macOS 14.6 finally brings dual external display support to the M3 MacBook Pro.

And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, or Twitter for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.