For anyone planning to use that at home:<p>> Shared iPad requires a mobile device management (MDM) solution and Managed Apple IDs that are issued and owned by the organization.<p>To note, I don't think I've ever seen an organization actually sharing their iPads at scale. For instance I saw a Sales fleet with central management but each employee has their own iPad that's exchange only if it dies or disfunctions.<p>Same for classrooms, each kid getting their own iPad seems to be the norm. I'd guess at the end of the day having multiple account on one device is still a PITA in some way ? (local storage management perhaps ?)
<i>Shared iPad requires a mobile device management (MDM) solution and Managed Apple IDs that are issued and owned by the organization.</i><p>In other words, this doesn't help out families who might want to share a single device. Lame.
Oh man, I got excited to use this with our kids, but then saw that it requires a " mobile device management (MDM) solution and Managed Apple IDs." I hope they consider the family use case in the future.
For those looking at using this at home with their family, I think it’s possible with a little effort. Jamfnow is free for three devices, and you can use Apple Configurator to setup the iPad in supervised mode. I haven’t tried multiple profiles myself, though.<p>Edited to add a link (no affiliation with Jamf, just a user):
<a href="https://www.jamf.com/products/jamf-now/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jamf.com/products/jamf-now/</a>
This isn’t new, but does highlight the fact that Apple often doesn’t let us have nice things. iPads do tend to be single-user devices in practice, but every time I have to help family or friends set one up I am taken aback by how much computing power they have today and how much more useful they could be.<p>Multi-user is just one thing, but especially galling for people on lower budgets or who want a tablet for family use.<p>But Apple is not alone. My Nexus 7 Android tablets (the first tablets I bought for my kids, second-hand off of eBay) supported multi-user quite well. I haven’t seen any modern Android tablets that do that (and I looked around at Android 11/12/13 tablets recently).
Apple truly has been very slow to market with a lot of basic features like this. And even this feature is only available to enterprises/schools with an IT department.<p>For a mature OS (if you subscribe to the idea that iPadOS is an OS in the first place), features like multiple profiles seem like table stakes.<p>I'm not sure whether I prefer a go to market approach more similar to Google (launch quick, and kill projects that don't work) or Apple's approach (launch extremely slow and be extra sure there's long-term product market fit).
My parents bought an iPad recently, intending to share it. They were dumfounded that it could only have one account and amazed that no-one had pointed it out to them when they went to buy it. It's now my Dad's iPad, which is a shame for my Mum.<p>Does this mean I could have got them a free Apple Business Manager account and given them two accounts? I assume it's not that simple, despite ABM being free?
My biggest gripe in the Apple ecosystem is this. iPad is closer than ever to MacOS but the keyboard shortcuts are different, there is no multiple users, etc. Its frustrating.
This would be an amazing alternative to not having work profiles if it worked on the iPhone. Work Profile is the biggest feature I miss from my Android days.