Enlarge / The iPad Pro is a good start, but iOS needs to get better for it to realize its full potential. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Last week, Apple announced its plans for iOS 9.3. It’s surprisingly ambitious for a point update, hearkening back to the days of iOS 4.x where these smaller mid-cycle updates could be expected to do more than fix bugs or support new hardware and services.
Like the larger iOS 9 update, iOS 9.3 also introduces a big and possibly game-changing feature for iPads, at least if you’re in education: a true multi-user mode. This feature is exclusively for schools right now, and Apple tells us that there’s no way for standard users to enable it to try it out for themselves. I wouldn’t expect that to last forever, though—it's likely that the feature will roll out to the general public as part of iOS 10 or some future update after Apple has some real-world usage data and time to fine-tune.
All of the new features introduced in iOS 9.x (plus the iPad Pro) point to Apple’s intentions for the iPad, which still sells fairly well but has experienced a steady year-over-year sales slide for every quarter since early 2014. Like the iPhone, the iPad will continue to be a touch-first platform that assumes you’re using the touchscreen as the primary method of input, but it will continue to pick up more “computer-y” features that make better use of its larger screen and more powerful internal hardware.
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