I have AirPods, but the experience still sucks with multiple devices.
I have my phone, my laptop, my iPad, and two iPads for my kids, all on my account. I literally am unable to make my kid’s iPads forget my AirPods, because it is tied to the apple account. If I have the iPads forget them, it forgets them on all my devices. It is annoying as hell, I have to leave Bluetooth off on my kids iPads.
Creating AppleIDs for your kids through Family Sharing and using those AppleIDs on those devices would solve this. You as organizer can view and manage all devices; all purchases are paid through your account (but are tied to the purchaser), and you can set restrictions and require permissions for many activities (including in-app purchases). Plus, all the bluetooth devices remain per-user. And it keeps your stuff out of their stuff and vice versa (though selected items can be shared).
I should do this for my kids, yes, but it is still annoying just for my own devices. I don’t want to use my AirPods on all my devices, just one… why can’t I do that?
On the device you do not want them to connect to automatically go to Bluetooth settings, find your AirPods, click on (i) and change "Connect to this iPhone" from "Automatically" to "When Last Connected to This iPhone".
Not sure if you have kids, but the devices didn’t start out as being theirs. It was my iPad, they started using it more as they got older, and eventually I got a new one for me. I should set it up properly, but it happened gradually and I have not gotten around to changing it… and now all the apps and accounts and settings are tied to my Apple ID.
The more important question is how old are yours? Toddlers can't read so much, so it's easier to understand not making them their own accounts it a priority. On the other hand, if they're teenagers, seeing private texts between their parents could be deleterious to their mental health. Still, they're not getting younger. The only way out involves some level of pain, but the sooner they get their own accounts, the less pain there will be.
“Ummm” aside, this is not at all obvious. I have an iPad from before I had kids. When setting it up, I was asked to enter my Apple ID, so I did. Then came kids and a new use for this iPad, and a second iPad, which obviously needed the same apps, and a third. No, it never occurred to me to set up appleids specifically for toddlers. It did eventually prompt me to set up a new “iPads” appleid when I switched from android to iPhone and suddenly discovered that all my text messages were being delivered to my children. But the ipads are family devices, not per-child, and if apple thinks I’m going to give each kid an appleid, they aren’t paying attention to how people actually want to use their devices.
"Umm aside" not-aside, I'm sorry for triggering you. it's too late for me to edit my comment and take that out but I would if I could. So this may not be obvious to you, but what's obvious to someone isn't necessarily obvious to other people, and vice versa. In any case, I can see why creating a separate account if you only have toddlers seems too onerous. Don't worry though, they'll become teenagers who want (and deserve) the autonomy and agency of having their own account before you know it, even if sharing your photos to their idevice wasn't enough to motivate you. Separate accounts seems the most reasonably way do implement a shared but-not-system to preserve privacy, a favorite reason Apple cites as their reason for doing things. I'm not sure how else Apple could do a shared system for teens.
I think there's a hack involving getting a cheap phone number for each toddler, adding that to iCloud, then disabling message delivery to that number but I haven't tested it.
I'm in agreement that Apple does not know how ipads are actually used in many families. There is nothing personal or private on our shared ipads, either, and it makes no sense to tightly bind each physical device to a single person's appleid. They are basically roaming web browsers and game screens. Nobody reads their email on them, for example. And this doesn't even get into the question of whether a small child should need to remember usernames and passwords and consent to EULAs. The devices should have settings which respect that while some individual's appleid (e.g. mine) is ultimately responsible for the device, that in no way reflects who the typical user of the device is or what they should have access to in the corresponding apple account. A checkbox during setup that says "this is a shared device that should not have access to my personal data" would be perfectly fine.
Emphasis on should here. In the "real world" with real family pressures a lot of the time good account hygene goes out the window. In my experience account sharing is rife on "kid" iPads, especially as many of them are often hand-me-down devices that people don't want to have to go through the pain of reinstalling everything again for a new user.
The ideal solution is iOS on iPad gets multiple user account support (like general purpose Macs and PCs have had for decades....), and you could just quickly throw on a new kid account, but Apple clearly like forcing you to buy one iPad per user account and reinstall everything every time it gets a new user - shared devices aren't as great for the company bottom line.
The sad thing is this support is largely there in the OS already built; its just locked to schools/businesses and is a PITA to setup for private owners:
Honestly, the lack of multiple user accounts is borderline criminal in my opinion, especially on the high spec expensive M1 iPad models that cost as much as a multi-user laptop.
I agree; it's really a shame that they don't have multi-user support unlocked for iPads with Family Sharing, especially for those with kids! It's right there and probably wouldn't take too many engineering resources..
I'd be worried that little Timmy would accidentally turn on photo sync or something for the adult's account and see... certain pictures he should not be seeing kinda-thing. Or iMessage and send something to someone. Though; if you're strict about the restrictions feature or guided access you should be safe?
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 shuffle around - potentially - 1 TB home directories for each person.
We're getting closer, but storage and networks need to get even better before the majority of regular people can do this and will tolerate it, not just the power users.
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 a time - its unheard of, and was solved decades ago.
Again, iOS is already a multi-user OS - Apple just choose to artificially restrict how you can use it.
> potentially - 1 TB home directories for each person.
This is just being silly - people log families and many users into drives far smaller than this all the time.
> 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.
I'm sorry but I still find this hilarious. You can spend over 2k on an iPad that already has a cutting edge M2 CPU, the same CPU family that supports multiple users on every other non-iPad device, we are not waiting on anything here. Everything needed exists and has done so for decades.
Time is not required. A change to how Apple runs its iPad business is needed. This hasn't been a technical choice for a long time.
> yes, hardware is cheap.
You can buy an iPad in configurations up to 2500 dollars. For a single user computer. These are not cheap computers by any reasonable definition, given the amount of compute power you can buy for 1000 dollars elsewhere (including from Apple!).
> potentially - 1 TB home directories for each person.
> 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.
Almost no kids have 1 TB iPads in my experience - they are far too expensive for children! Almost no adults have 1tb iPads given their cost as well really - it turns an iPad into a 4 figure device. But perhaps you think 1500 dollars + taxes is "cheap" for a single user computer with 1tb of storage too?
My final point - almost all of their competitors can do this today, often on much lower specification hardware too. Windows 11, Android and ChromeOS tablets all can have multiple user accounts, just like almost any other plain ole computer made in the last 20+ years.
I have my phone, my laptop, my iPad, and two iPads for my kids, all on my account. I literally am unable to make my kid’s iPads forget my AirPods, because it is tied to the apple account. If I have the iPads forget them, it forgets them on all my devices. It is annoying as hell, I have to leave Bluetooth off on my kids iPads.