Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the average person, they (Apple) probably feel like Family Sharing is the right mechanism to address these issues. Education and Business customers have Shared iPad because of the different environments they operate in where the use case is clear. In a world where (generally speaking) people are expensive and hardware is cheap, Apple probably thinks each person having their own device is easier than trying to shu…
> hardware is cheap There is nothing cheap about iPads, especially the models that have the same M1 processors and similar pricepoints as a MacBook. It's laughable they don't have multiple user support today, and is solely to protect sales of the devices. I'm genuinely surprised someone would defend this behaviour. Imagine you bought any other computer for north of 1000 dollars and you could only log one person in at…
> There is nothing cheap about iPads, especially the models that have the same M1 processors and similar pricepoints as a MacBook. It's laughable they don't have multiple user support today, and is solely to protect sales of the devices.
Compared to the days when people had 1 machine (e.g, mainframes) and connected to it with comparatively dumb terminal devices, yes, hardware is cheap.
For a more recent example, I'll point out that the first computer I was reasonably involved with getting into our house was a Dell 4100 in the late 90's. At the time, it cost ~$1400, a not insignificant portion of that price attributable to a CD-RW.
In short, you probably couldn't really get anything below $1000 - given that baseline, I don't know how you could say things aren't cheap when we now have Chromebooks in Edu/Business which are at best $250-300.
At least publicly, Apple doesn't break out P&L for each product/division, although they do give sales numbers, so it's difficult to say if missing features which let them hit a price point have an impact.
> I'm genuinely surprised someone would defend this behaviour. Imagine you bought any other computer for north of 1000 dollars and you could only log one person in at a time - its unheard of, and was solved decades ago.
iOS/iPadOS still has UNIX underneath, so multiuser is definitely possible, even if it's not exposed in the GUI in all situations. Give it time.
> This is just being silly - people log families and many users into drives far smaller than this all the time.
My point about the size of home directories is colored by my own experience - for example, I don't use streaming music services and am a bit of a video hoarder - ask people with kids how big their photo libraries are and I think you'll be surprised how much the average person is carrying around with them.