Windows XP had this feature. Chromebooks have this feature. It's inexcusable that such an expensive gadget can only have one user.
For the past 5+ years it's been, "This will be the year of real work on the iPad," but they keep circling around it, trying not to make iPads accidentally powerful enough for someone to skip buying a MacBook.
Which is really silly, because if someone needs to do actual work they are not going to do it on an iPad no matter how capable it is. The form factor simply does not work for getting work done. Apple has nothing to fear here.
TBH, if you buy an iPad and their nice keyboard case, it costs almost as much as an MBA. This is one of the reasons I simply cannot justify getting a new iPad these days. The other is that my 8 year old iPad Pro still works just fine, in case I ever need to do iPad-ish things like draw with the pencil.
My macOS muscle memory works most of the time, but there are also quite some details which are slightly different or missing. If they would allow a macOS “mode” on iPad I would choose it over a MacBook instantly for work.
I'm still of the opinion that there's a market, albeit a small one, for a "consumer" MDM product for use cases like this, better parental controls, etc. but almost all are for business and come with some kind of minimum device purchase like 30+ devices.
We switch in apps (ie in netflix). This whole "one person one device" just makes the iPad a shallow consumption device and keeps the laptops for work (and also often for streaming because of this. Btw they are all 2nd hand business laptops running Linux; for the Kids Gnome is very iPad/ChromeOS like and familiar).
It would be so much more useful a device, and maybe we'd even then start buying more, if we could just switch user profiles.
Oh, because it's just a consumption device when we "needed" another one, we got a Xiaomi. Who cares about al the niceties of the iPad anyway when all it does is show video.
That said, having worked on account/identity systems at another FAANG, I think that the commenters saying that Apple is holding this back purely to sell more iPads are underestimating the complexity of this feature.
This is not a feature that you just bolt on to the top. It will require a significant ground up rewrite of iOS' fundamentals if you want to support account switching without a full shut down of the device (and even with that, there are complications with shared storage).
There are likely tons of singletons across the iOS codebase for the "current account", and switching between users will easily lead to bugs where the new account shares/accesses state from the previous account.....and these "violations" are much harder to detect via static analysis than you might naively imagine.
UPDATE: I wasn't aware that Apple already supported a bunch of this via MDM. My only point was that if they didn't already build this into the foundational layer of the OS, then this is a very difficult feature to add later. If they already have this, then I don't have any defense left for them.
Shared iPad overview
Shared iPad allows more than one user to sign in to an iPad. The iPad needs to be supervised before Shared iPad can be used. Shared iPad can be used not only in education but also in business. Multiple users can use the iPad, and the user experiences can be personal even though the devices are shared.
Shared iPad requires a device management service and Managed Apple Accounts that an organization issues and owns. Users with a Managed Apple Account can then sign in to an organization-owned Shared iPad. Devices need to have at least 32 GB of storage and be supervised. The following devices support Shared iPad:
I don't want to have to do a bunch of sysadmin just so my wife and I can both see our own YouTube subscriptions on an iPad. Again, you could do this with zero fuss in 5 minutes on Windows XP.
You just have to turn it on with a MDM profile. It's just consumers they don't let use it.
It may be a fine media consumption device (browsing, reading, watching); it's a bit heavy but has a large battery.
I don't see any other serious applications for a home user, such that would play the iPad-specific strengths.
For example, it's hard to manage app store purchased Apps if it's easy to switch users in iPad. It's hard to manage iCloud sync when switching, it's also related with privacy.
Just have the coffee table iPad be a display for your own iPad. You could even have a virtual iPad on your mac that you show on the coffee one if you don't have your own.
MacOS has 'high-performance' screen sharing using hardware encoder/decoder now. Windows has had this for years and it's so fast it's like actually using the remote computer. It's not like old-school VNC, the only real functional drawback is that you can't leave wifi range.
Apple have built much of the software infrastructure to support multiple users on iPadOS, the feature exists for education market customers etc:
> https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...
I also suspect someone at Apple has run the numbers on device sales and has decided the status quo where an iPad is a 1:1 device and makes more money for the company is preferable.
I was pretty surprised when the AppleTV of all things got multiple-user account login support before the iPad did!