Apple quietly euthanises the ipad with a cheaper macbook neo and a folding iphone
apple’s tablet golden child is bleeding from three self-inflicted wounds: a $599 MacBook that undercuts the iPad Air by $369, a folding iPhone that unfolds into a mini-tablet, and a kitchen-shelf smart screen that does everything the entry iPad does—minus the price premium.
How the macbook neo became a trojan horse
Corporations talk cannibalisation; apple practises it. The Neo’s A18 Pro, the same SoC ticking inside the iPhone 16 Pro, benches within spitting distance of the original M1. Translation: web tabs, Office, Xcode playgrounds and 4K streams run fanless and 16-hour battery life, all for the education price of $499. Add apple’s Magic Keyboard to the cheapest 256 GB iPad and you’re already at $700—with half the ports, no trackpad, and the productivity ceiling of iPadOS.
That maths is already reshaping channel inventory. Best Buy insiders tell me iPad Air 11-inch sell-through rates dipped 18 % week-over-week after Neo demos hit shop floors. apple’s own retail staff now lead with the laptop first, tablet second—an unthinkable script only six months ago.
The folding iphone that eats the ipad mini alive
iOS 17.5 beta code hides a dormant “flex mode” that spawns resizable iPad-style windows when the shell unfolds past 140°. Gurman’s moles say the final hardware lands at $1,499 next spring—steep, yes, but still cheaper than an iPad Pro 12.9 plus cellular plus pencil plus keyboard. Once reviewers clock that the same panel doubles as a Kindle, Nintendo console and DaVinci storyboard, the Mini’s raison d’être evaporates.
apple knows. They froze iPad mini component orders for Q3, channel checks by CIRP show. Suppliers I spoke with in Taipei were told to “prepare for zero refreshes before 2026”.
Even the kitchen counter wants in
The J490 “home hub”—a squat 7-inch watchOS brain on a magnetic speaker base—mirrors the iPad’s dashboard tricks: FaceTime, HomeKit tiles, recipe cards. Apple targets $349, identical to the 10th-gen iPad, but bundles a far-field six-mic array the tablet can’t match. Expect Tim Cook to unveil it this side of Christmas, just as Matter 1.3 goes wide and consumers ask why they need two glass slabs.
Then comes the tabletop robot: iPad-sized display, servo arm, 2027. Same silicon, same Siri, same price envelope. The iPad becomes a modular part, not a product line.
The only survivor wears a pencil
Strip away the spreadsheets, the sofa Netflix sessions, the FaceTime cookbook, and one use case survives Apple’s fratricidal crossfire: stylus-first creativity. Procreate, Adobe Fresco and 120 Hz ProMotion still feel better on glass than on foldable OLED. That’s why, I’m told, Apple will keep a single iPad—call it iPad Pro Creative—alive: 13-inch, OLED, MagSafe Pencil 3, priced around $999. Everything else—Air, Mini, vanilla—walks the plank.
Expect the cull to start this autumn, when the Neo goes on back-to-school promo and the folding iPhone steals the October keynote spotlight. By 2026 the iPad shelf you once knew will look like the iPod rack of 2014: one SKU, one story, one last stand.