Hear me out: an iPad Ink

July 27, 2025

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

However, the market it helped create has shifted dramatically these last few years, and Apple hasn’t kept up.

Not a Kindle

Part of the iPad’s original spiel was that it was a general-purpose device that, while far superior to Amazon’s dinky Kindle for reading, also sat between the iPhone and the Mac for general consumption and productivity. You love your iPhone, you love your Mac, so… yeah. iPad. Go!

As the iPad lineup expanded outward and upward with its many variants and generations, combined with multiple iterations and combinations of accessories, it set itself even further apart from the dinky Kindle and every other basic tablet out there.

The thing is, as the gap between them widened, a new product category quietly moved in. Once niche and clunky, the e-ink tablet has matured into something that Apple shouldn’t be ignoring anymore.

Not an iPad

It is very true that when they first came out, e-ink tablets were awful, especially the color e-ink ones, which soon followed. Color precision sucked. Color depth sucked. Image quality sucked. The list went on.

And it didn’t help that the hardware usually looked cheap, coming from Chinese companies that most people probably had never heard of. And they were expensive. Which is to say, they cost pretty much the same as an iPad.

But that’s no longer the case. I mean, devices like the reMarkable Paper Pro, the BOOX Note, the XPPen Magic Note Pad and many others are still expensive, but they have stopped being purported as bizarro iPads and have turned into their own, proper product category.

Ironically, this has made them quite appealing for iPad users who feel caught in the paradox of having to fight a system that needs to get more capable just so that they can accomplish simpler tasks.

In the end, this comes down to the fact that there is a reason why products like the reMarkable tablets keep making waves and many of us keep hearing about them. If you had never heard about them, suffice it to say that people are interested in them.

Not all people, by any means. But perhaps more than, say… the iPad mini?

If you haven’t seen Michael Burkhardt’s excellent comparison between the iPad Air and the reMarkable Paper Pro, you really should.

And here’s the twist: some of these new devices don’t even use e-ink at all (which, for all intents and purposes, is a proprietary technology by E Ink).

There’s a growing class of tablets that use traditional displays, but offer modes that mimic the visual and functional constraints of e-ink. In other words, they behave like e-ink tablets without being held back by e-ink’s shortcomings, while still being conceptually different from what it would mean for Apple to just slap an “ink mode” onto the iPad.

The case for an iPad Ink

No one’s buying a reMarkable to run Final Cut Pro. That much is obvious. But that is also kind of the point. These devices don’t pretend to be alternative full-blown computers. They lean into being focused, distraction-free, and delightfully single-purpose.

Meanwhile, the iPad keeps bolting on Mac-but-not-quite features like Stage Manager, but every step in that direction also highlights how stiff it still is.

Are there people who live by the iPad and have absolutely no idea or earthly way to possibly comprehend what I am babbling on about? Yes. But even they have to agree that they are an increasingly rarer breed.

That’s where the iPad Ink comes in.

Not an e-ink notepad. Not a souped-up e-reader. Not an iPad clone with fewer apps. An actual, proper new product category, much like the one Apple is reportedly developing for the home.

A purpose-built, ultra-low-distraction device with stylus support, thought from the ground up with productivity in mind. And perhaps featuring an on-device small language model to help out with productivity tasks. That’d be neat.

Is Apple ever going to make one of those? Probably not. But while it keeps side-engineering the iPad around its idea of what work should look like, more and more people seem to be turning to the ever-growing list of reMarkable-like products for, you know, work.