Apple responded with the iPad Pro, which brought more power than anyone who didn’t know what to do. The original iPad had made its debut at $ 499, which, according to Jobs, would put it in many hands. The pro was at the price like a Mac but was always associated with an operating system designed to produce web pages, browsing photos and painting your fingers. At the same time, he came, the Apple pencil – an apple stylus. Has Apple “blown”? Well, no, because the iPad did not do it require A stylus, and he provided an answer to users who needed a precision input.
But it was a clear gap compared to the original vision, which Apple has continued to keep away over the years – an apparent admission that perhaps users wanted more than an oversized iPhone. However, the company has also retained, reluctant to risk cannibalizing Mac sales. So, instead of allowing the iPad to become the device he wanted to be, Apple preferred to smooth the transition between Apparatus, leaving occasional and powerful users in strange limbo.
Between a Mac and a hard place
Each year, the iPad has moved away from the vision of Jobs and nevertheless managed to leave people dissatisfied. Apple added a complexity for typical users and continued to reinvent the wheel in a way that has always left power users by wishing more. The emphasis has been replaced by confusion.
Apple insisted on the fact that the iPad was not a laptop replacement, then sent a magnetic keyboard that made it look like one. The mouse support was reluctantly added. The M1 chips arrived in a flambé of glory in any crushing need, on devices that could not even optimize the second screen output for external screens.
Then, the stage manager appeared in 2022, a window model on the iPad and Mac that no one asked and almost no one liked. Clumsy. Delicate. An over-designed response to an Apple problem refused to tackle fully: why not simply make the iPad more like a Mac?
Now Apple has done what he swore. The iPados 26 transform the iPad into a multitasking in its own right, a little window, a click-click, an Apple computer in external device support and compromise. The windows can overlap. The cursor is pointed. There is even a menu bar. It is fluid, capable and familiar. And even if it is not enough A Mac – practically, it should be more Like a – It is certainly not an iPad from the Employment era either. He finally abandons the field of origin.
The Jobs ghost always haunts the iPad
And yet. Buried in iPados 26 is a return mode: a full -screen applications option that deletes modern multitasking to a certain extent that the iPad has not seen for years. No windows. Not even the divided view. It is an application at a time, with all the purity of the original iPad.
Which means that the iPad is no longer between two extremes – instead of swing. The iPad is now two devices in one, the iPad that Steve Jobs imagined and the machine that the pros begged. A touch screen slate And a split productivity machine. An apple spork.
So, yes, an iPad executing iPados 26 can always contain the soul of the original iPad, hiding deep in the parameters, waiting to be activated. But jobs dream of a third targeted and elegant device category between smartphone and laptop is actually dead.
In 2010, the man himself said: “Do we have what it takes to establish a third category of products, a great product between a laptop and a smartphone? The bar is quite high. We must better do key things. We think we did.” Indeed you did it. But it didn’t last. And it is for the better because, if it was, the iPad itself might not have lasted either.
