Dear Apple - iPad is NOT a personal device like iPhone

I love my iPad. I no longer walk around the house with a laptop (although my Macbook Air is not a very heavy thing to carry around in the first place) and it’s so cool that the iPad apps are so great to work with. I have my Dropbox app, Evernote, Nozbe for iPad, Productive Magazine, Reeder to read news, Penultimate to sketch stuff… and even LogMeIn to log in to my home PC server… and while I love this setup, I also have a problem with it.

The thing is - my wife also uses our iPad and she loves it.

You see, iPad is our “family computer” - a thing that we pick up to read news, do some browsing, do some sketching and view videos… and we both use it very happily… but there’s no way to configure it for a multi-user environment. My wife doesn’t want to see all of my stuff and I don’t want to see my wife’s dozens of solitaire games… I’d like to customize it for myself… and I need to take compromises with my wife.

And my baby girl who loves the pocket pond HD.

I can’t justify buying another iPad for my wife. We don’t use it THAT much.

That’s another thing - iPad is a casual reading/browsing device and we don’t use it that much to justify a purchase of another one. We love it as a family computer. My wife has an iPhone, I have an iPhone… and we both have the iPad and it’s OK like this.

Dear Apple, please understand that iPad is not a personal device

It’s a family device - and I have 64GB of memory so it’s not a problem to share even iTunes libraries from different users. I’d want my iPad to sync with my computer and my username there and my wife’s computer with her username… but even if you don’t give us a sync, just give us a way to create new users and play with the current apps and help people make their profiles there.

Let’s say we both want to use Reeder for RSS reading (me and my wife) - there’s no way for us to set it up like this. We need to get around it and it’s not in align with Apple’s “easy to use” policy.

Sadly in the newest iOS update the multi-user support is not there.

I know Apple you want to sell lots of iPads, but think about your users for a second. I’m your good customer, I own lots of Apple hardware but I refuse to buy more iPads for my family. We need just one and we want to share it. I don’t want to share my iPhone and neither does my wife with her iPhone… but we do want to have one iPad in our family with each other’s personal profile.

Do you think iPad is a personal device or a family device?