Apple quietly slits the ipad’s throat from three sides

The iPad is bleeding, and the knife bears an Apple logo. Last week’s soft-launch of the $599 MacBook Neo isn’t just another cheap laptop—it is a precision strike that turns the company’s most beloved tablet into an overpriced toy.

Look at the receipts. A 256 GB iPad Air plus Magic Keyboard: $968. The Neo with the same storage, an A18 Pro heart, full macOS, keyboard and trackpad baked in: $599. The math is brutal, but the subtext is nastier: Cupertino no longer believes its middle child deserves protection.

A cannibal in a candy-colored shell

Inside the Neo, the iPhone 15 Pro’s silicon runs almost toe-to-toe with the original M1. Web tabs stay sticky, Xcode compiles, 4K timelines play without a stutter. The fanless slab weighs 1.23 kg and will sip electrons for 16 hours of lecture-hall abuse. Students—once the iPad’s captive market—are already swapping Folios for clamshells in campus discords. Enrollment numbers leak in September; expect a bloodbath.

Meanwhile, the foldableiPhone looms. iOS 27 builds contain split-view hooks that only fire when the screen unfolds to a mini-iPad canvas. Same apps, same aspect ratio, same couch-friendly consumption posture, but it fits in a jeans pocket. The moment that hinge clicks, the iPad mini becomes redundant hardware.

From coffee-table command center to wall ornament

Apple’s smart-home skunk-works tells the rest of the story. Project J490—basically a stapled-together iPad nailed to a speaker grille—will retail around $350, the exact entry price of the vanilla iPad. The robotic arm edition, penciled for 2027, just adds servos so the screen can follow you while you stir pasta. Both run neutered watchOS, but consumers won’t care: they’ll pay once for a kitchen TV, FaceTime station and HomeKit dial that never needs to be unplugged.

Strip away the marketing gloss and you see the same component: a 7- to 10-inch slab Apple can’t stop re-packaging. The iPad’s original sin—existing in the vacuum between phone and laptop—has been surgically divided among cheaper, sexier siblings.

Creative pros clutching Apple Pencils will howl, and yes, the Pro models survive for now. Yet even there, macOS is nibbling at the edges: Final Cut on a Neo exports faster than on an iPad Air thanks to desktop-class memory handling. Adobe’s beta Illustrator for Silicon Mac already supports stylus input via Sidecar. The message is clear: if you need precision, buy a Mac and plug a Wacom—or wait for the foldable Pro that bends into a sketchbook.

Apple won’t euthanize the iPad overnight; the supply chain is too lucrative. Expect a slow-motion vanishing: first the Air, then the mini, finally the base model, until only a single, pencil-centric Creative Edition remains—priced like a Studio Display and marketed like a religion. The rest of the line-up is already on death row, execution date set the instant the Neo hit store shelves.

Tim Cook once bragged that Apple could afford to cannibalize itself. He forgot to mention the victim sometimes dies.