“Apple this week offered a preview of features in the upcoming release of iOS 9.3. Those features include a range of consumer enhancements, including Night Shift, a viewing mode that minimizes the output of blue light that can disrupt sleep patterns; significant improvements in the iPhone’s health tracking capabilities; the ability to secure notes; and improvements to CarPlay and the iOS News app,” Ryan Faas reports for Computerworld. “The most significant changes, however, are aimed at the education market, though it’s likely those changes will eventually reshape iPad use in the office and at home.”
“The biggest advance is known as Shared iPad,” Faas reports. “As the name suggests, this feature lets students share iPads and it’s designed for schools where cost or policy concerns prevent implementation of a one-iPad-per-student program. Shared iPad allows students to log into an iPad similar to how they would log into a Mac or PC. The result is that a student’s apps, content and progress through various tasks will be available, regardless of which iPad they actually use.”
“Apple is supporting multiple users on an iOS device for the first time. That is extremely significant because the company has never shown any real interest in making iOS a multi-user environment,” Faas reports. “If this does become a standard iOS feature, it will mark a major expansion of capability on par with support for mobile management in iOS 4 or Apple’s Device Enrollment Program introduced in iOS 7. Whether Apple will move forward with multi-user support, to what extent, and in what form remain unanswered questions. But the idea is exciting from the perspective of educators, consumers, business users, and IT professionals.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Obviously, multi-user support would be useful for everyone and is long, long overdue.
As we wrote over three and a half years ago in May 2012:
It would be relatively trivial to bring at least Fast User Switching over to iOS from OS X. That Apple hasn’t done so long ago suggests to us that they’d rather sell an iPad to every family member than a single iPad per family.
If we’re right about why iOS still doesn’t have multi-user support, then Apple’s wrong.
Not only are they failing to “delight customers,” but they are failing to realize that it won’t impinge iPad sales, but enhance them. Enabling multi-user support, makes the iPad even more attractive to families and, once families get their first iPad, they quickly realize that they need more than one. One iPad, even between only two people, just isn’t enough.
Enabling multi-user support will actually end up selling more iPads. So, get on the ball, Apple. Enable multi-user support in iOS already!
(If it’s a storage space issue, make the feature available as “dual-user” on 32 GB iPads and “up to four users” on 64GB models. That’d give more incentive to buy more spacious and higher priced models and, since Apple already sells a 16GB model, they tacitly endorse 16GB as the base requirement for an iPad user.)
SEE ALSO:
Apple delivers multi-user support for iPad – in schools only – January 11, 2016
Apple ‘currently investigating’ iOS multi-user support – May 7, 2012