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As the third tier of Apple\u2019s connected personal computing devices, the iPad sits in an awkward place in 2023. It\u2019s a supremely capable product, there\u2019s no doubt about that. It\u2019s powerful and responsive; most of the models have beautiful screens; and its interface is friendly. But it\u2019s also incomplete and insistent on doing things the Apple-prescribed way. And even as it dominates the tablet landscape, sales of iPads have withered since 2020<\/a>, as Mark Gurman noted in Bloomberg<\/em> today. In short: it needs more.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n To be clear, I like my 2021 iPad Pro a lot. It\u2019s a nice device for reading and solid for watching TV in bed. It\u2019s also indispensable for following recipes while I\u2019m cooking. But when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPad<\/a> in 2010, saying it had to be better at certain tasks \u2014 email, web browsing, videos, games \u2014 than the iPhone or a laptop, I wonder if he had a glorified recipe book in mind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It just feels like there should be more to Apple\u2019s tablet, 13 years on. It\u2019s an inviting device, but when I use it I can\u2019t shake the feeling that there\u2019s something I\u2019m missing; I can almost always do what I want to do better and faster on another device.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Part of the issue to me is that Apple behaves as though the iPad is a fully mature product, but still doesn\u2019t know what it actually is<\/em>. Jason Snell wrote a couple of days ago on his Six Colors blog that he had given up on the iPad-only travel dream<\/a>. He points at the iPad\u2019s lacking flexibility, weird, hampered iPad versions of apps, or altogether missing software. It\u2019s all very familiar to me, a person who normally brings an iPad on trips, but on two recent jaunts, brought my M2 MacBook Air instead and didn\u2019t miss my tablet even a little bit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It just feels like there should be more to the iPad.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Apple has done things over the decade-plus arc of iPad history to make it more capable, but they come up short. It can multitask like a laptop<\/a>! Well, sort of, but despite improvements<\/a> promised soon by iPadOS 17, Stage Manager soldiers on with weird, restrictive limitations like how many apps can live in a \u201cstage.\u201d Apple started putting its M-series laptop chips in some iPads, but nothing about them<\/a> seems to justify the added power. Other changes over the years have felt iterative at best.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Maybe that will change soon. Apple will release a slightly bigger 13-inch iPad Pro with OLED screens and M3 chips<\/a>, along with a revised Magic Keyboard with a bigger trackpad next year, writes Gurman in his Power On<\/em> newsletter for Bloomberg <\/em>today. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Maybe that hints at a Greater Purpose for the iPad \u2014 the iPhone Pro and the Apple Watch, which both use OLED screens, both have always-on displays. And the iPhone Pro StandBy feature that turns it into sort of a smart display or alarm clock<\/a> sounds remarkably similar to rumors that Apple would debut a similar feature for the iPad<\/a> that would turn it into a touchscreen control center for the Apple Home ecosystem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But it\u2019s not totally clear from the Bloomberg <\/em>article that the new iPad Pro models will be what Gurman calls the \u201cfirst major overhaul\u201d of the iPads since the introduction of the 2018 iPad Pro<\/a>. But hopefully, there\u2019s more to it, because right now, the rest of Apple\u2019s devices are sort of leaving the iPad behind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n