OMG Tim.

You shouldn’t stand in your shiny, sun-soaked spaceship office and tell us shit like this. It makes us hope.

Was this actually the biggest day for iPad since 2010? I’m scratching my head here, but if I were put on the spot and asked to define the date of the second-biggest moment in iPad history, I think I’d reach for 2018 instead of today.

That’s when we were given the 3rd generation iPad Pro. It’s the first iPad that abandoned the home button, employing FaceID and giving us the Home Indicator, as debuted on the iPhone X the year before. And it’s the one that had a CPU that clearly rivaled the Intel-powered Macs of the day, making us all believe that the time had come for iPads to surpass the Mac as our personal computers of choice, despite the previous year’s now-famous Mac Roundtable.

And it came with incredible accessories: a beautiful, wrap-around keyboard folio case, and the magnetically-attached Apple Pencil 2.

2018 is the last time I bought a high-end iPad. It suffered the same fate that had befallen all my previous high-end iPads: it had rebuffed my every attempt to make it the heart of my computing life. You know why: it’s the limits of iOS, the inability to run multiple apps simultaneously, the fact that great apps are forbidden from running on the device. I took one final crack at that problem, but it didn’t work out. After the failure of Codewerks, I gave the iPad to my wife, and bought an iPad Air.

I consigned my use of the iPad to the role it best serves: my Mastodon feed-scrolling, email-browsing, book-reading everywhere screen, with a bit of web browsing thrown in.

And that’s not even a bad thing for iPad! Those things are important to me, and the iPad is really great at them. When the new iPads Air were announced today, I bought a new one immediately after the announcement. Though I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t shattered my Air’s screen last year. 😬

Still, I can’t help but feel this twinge of resentment about iPad. For funsies, after buying the new Air, I went back into the store and started configuring an 11-inch M4 iPad Pro. The only reason I was tempted was the thin-ness and the weight; could I get a base model for something in the same range as the Air?

The answer, friends, is a hard no. By the time I was getting turned away from the nano texture glass because I hadn’t chosen the 1TB model, I was already at $1300 CAD — the 1TB model starts at an eye-watering $2,229! I let fly a stream of invective and closed the browser window.

Apple certainly likes to talk a big game about the creative uses people put their iPads to. And maybe there’s enough of a market to pick up a slip of glass that costs more than a well-appointed MacBook Pro? That does so much less than that MacBook Pro?

Well, Apple just announced their 2024 Q1 earnings. As reported by Jason Snell at Six Colors, iPad’s share of Apple’s revenue makes it the company’s smallest business: 8% of revenue (admittedly, given no iPads launched in 2023, they would be down). It’s not doing great. It’s a fine business, no doubt. But the company makes more money selling watches!

To summarize: an absolutely incredible piece of computing hardware, over-spec’d, over-priced. Running an operating system that handcuffs users, turning them away from some of the company’s most advanced technologies. For a share of that company’s business that puts it in a solid last place.

That’s why I think of the M4-powered iPad Pro as the gold Apple Watch of the company’s product lineup. Most people should not buy this device. And Apple should really wake up and reconsider their course with iPad.

I’m not the first to suggest this, but releasing the shackles, the limitations of iOS, and allowing the iPad to stand equally alongside the Mac as a platform that allows users to install software directly from developers? That allows for system-level interventions, Springboard replacements?

Come on, Tim Apple. If you want to really make an announcement that’s the second-biggest of iPad’s life, open up the platform. Let the dandelion seeds fly.