Listen: iPad Ink

Ever Trend Zone June 1, 2025 Blog

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The iPad is definitely a powerful product. It earns around 10% of Apple’s overall revenue and has more than twice the market share of its closest competitor, Samsung.

However, the markets it helped to generate have changed dramatically over the last few years, and Apple has not maintained it.

Not a Kindle

Part of the original spill on the iPad was that it was a generic device that was far better than Amazon’s Dinky Kindle, but was a generic device that sat between the iPhone and Mac due to general consumption and productivity. You love your iPhone, you love your Mac, so…yeah. iPad. go!

With the iPad lineup, along with many variations and generations, expanded outside and upwards, combined with multiple iterations and combinations of accessories, it’s even further apart from the Dinky Kindle and all other basic tablets.

Things have been quietly moving as the gap between them widened. When it’s niche and clunky, E-ink tablets have matured into something Apple shouldn’t ignore anymore.

Not an iPad

It’s very true that when they first came out, the e-ink tablets were terrible, especially the e-ink tablets of color that followed quickly were terrible. The accuracy of the colour was sucked in. The depth of the colour was sucked in. Image quality was sucked in. The list continued.

And it didn’t help that coming from a Chinese company that most people have never heard of and that the hardware usually looked cheap. And they were expensive. That is, it costs roughly the same as an iPad.

But that’s not the case anymore. So, while devices like the notable Paper Pro, Books Notes, and Xppen Magic Note Pad are still expensive, they stopped being claimed as Bizarro iPads and have become their own appropriate product category.

Ironically, this has made them very appealing to iPad users who feel they’ve been caught up in the paradox of having to fight systems that need to be more capable so that they can achieve easier tasks.

Ultimately, this comes down to the fact that products like amazing tablets continue to make waves and there is a reason why many of us keep listening to them. If you’ve never heard of them, it’s enough to say that people are interested in them.

Not everyone. But perhaps more than that… iPad mini?

If you’ve never seen a great comparison between Michael Burkhardt’s iPad Air and The Amearmable Paper Pro, you really should.

And this gives a twist. Some of these new devices use no E-Ink at all (this is a unique technology with E-Ink for all intents and purposes).

There is an increasing number of tablets that use traditional displays but offer modes that mimic the visual and functional constraints of e-inks. In other words, they behave like an E-ink tablet without being stifled by the shortcomings of E-ink, but it’s conceptually different for Apple to slap “ink mode” on the iPad.

For iPad ink

No one has bought a notable person to run Final Cut Pro. That’s obvious. But that’s a kind of point too. These devices don’t pretend to be an alternative, full-fledged computer. They are focused, leaning on distractions and having fun and single purpose.

Meanwhile, the iPad continues to bolt Mac-But-Not-Quite features like Stage Manager, but every step in that direction emphasizes how stiff it is still.

Anyone living on an iPad and have no ideas or earthly ways to understand babbling? yes. But even they must agree that they are increasingly rare breeds.

That’s the introduction of iPad ink.

It’s not an E-Ink notepad. It’s not an e-book reader with soup. It’s not an iPad clone with few apps. The actual appropriate new product category is reportedly developed for the home.

A dedicated ultra-low dispersion device with stylus support is thought from the ground up with productivity in mind. And perhaps it has a small language model on the device to aid in productivity tasks. It’s beautiful.

Is Apple going to make one of them? Probably not. But as it continues to side engineer around the idea of what kind of work should look like, it seems more and more people are turning to a growing list of amazing products you know.