Apple responded with the iPad Professional, which introduced extra horsepower than anybody knew what to do with. The unique iPad had debuted at $499, which Jobs argued would get it into many fingers. The Professional was priced like a Mac however was nonetheless paired with an working system designed for prodding internet pages, flicking by photographs, and finger-painting. Alongside it got here the Apple Pencil—an Apple stylus. Had Apple subsequently “blown it”? Effectively, no, as a result of the iPad didn’t require a stylus, and it offered a solution for customers who wanted precision enter.
But it surely was a transparent departure from the unique imaginative and prescient, which Apple continued to chip away at over time—a seeming admission that possibly customers did need greater than a supersized iPhone. But the corporate additionally held again, reluctant to danger cannibalizing Mac gross sales. So as a substitute of permitting the iPad to develop into the machine it wished to be, Apple most popular to clean the transition between units, leaving informal and energy customers alike in an odd limbo.
Between a Mac and a Arduous Place
Annually, the iPad strayed farther from Jobs’ imaginative and prescient and but in some way managed to nonetheless depart folks unhappy. Apple added complexity for typical customers and saved reinventing the wheel in ways in which at all times left energy customers wanting extra. Focus was changed by confusion.
Apple insisted the iPad wasn’t a laptop computer alternative, then shipped a magnetic keyboard that made it appear to be one. Mouse help was grudgingly added. M1 chips arrived in a blaze of glory to no crushing want, on units that also couldn’t even optimize second-screen output for exterior shows.
Then Stage Supervisor confirmed up in 2022, a windowing mannequin throughout iPad and Mac that no one requested for and virtually no one preferred. Clunky. Fiddly. An overdesigned reply to an issue Apple refused to totally grapple with: Why not simply make the iPad extra like a Mac?
Now, Apple has completed the factor it swore it by no means would. iPadOS 26 turns the iPad right into a full-blown multitasking, window-wrangling, traffic-light-button-clicking, external-display-supporting, compromise-abandoning Apple pc. Home windows can overlap. The cursor is pointy. There’s even a menu bar. It’s fluid, succesful, and acquainted. And whereas it’s not fairly a Mac—arguably, it in some methods must be extra like one—it’s positively not a Jobs-era iPad both. It lastly abandons the unique pitch.
Jobs’ Ghost Nonetheless Haunts the iPad
And but. Buried in iPadOS 26 is a throwback mode: a Full-Display Apps possibility that removes fashionable multitasking to a level the iPad hasn’t seen in years. No home windows. Not even Cut up View. It’s one app at a time, with all of the purity of the unique iPad.
Which implies the iPad not sits between two extremes—as a substitute, you change between them. The iPad is now two units in a single, the iPad that Steve Jobs imagined and the machine that professionals have begged for. A touchscreen consumption slate and a windowed productiveness machine. An Apple spork.
So, sure, an iPad operating iPadOS 26 should still comprise the soul of the unique iPad, lurking deep in Settings, ready to be turned on. However the Jobs dream of a centered, elegant third machine class between smartphone and laptop computer is successfully useless.
Again in 2010, the person himself stated: “Do we’ve what it takes to determine a 3rd class of merchandise, an superior product in between a laptop computer and smartphone? The bar is fairly excessive. It’s gotta be higher at performing some key issues. We expect we’ve completed it.” Certainly you probably did. But it surely didn’t final. And it’s for the most effective as a result of, if it had, the iPad itself won’t have lasted both.