Update: March 5, 2025

I wrote a small application that outputs ProcessInfo.ThermalState. The reported Thermal State is nominal when the iPad is not heating, fair when the iPad started to heat and serious when the iPad was hurting to touch. I defintely had the iPad heating more than serious on other occurrences.

Update: March 4, 2025

The response to this post has been overwhelming, with sharing on Hacker News and Reddit. It's clear that many others are experiencing frustrations with Apple's software, indicating quality issue within Apple's OSes portfolio.

To provide more context, here's the workflow that triggers these issues: I create a new note at the start of each lecture, add a title and tags for organization, and begin writing with my Apple Pencil Pro.
The issues manifest after filling roughly one page (or "screen") with handwritten notes. The iPad here starts to overheat, and lag spikes become increasingly frequent.

As a long-time Apple user, I've always appreciated the integration of hardware and software, signature of the Apple ecosystem. However, recent experiences with my iPad Air 11" M2 has left me questioning whether Apple has lost sight of what once made their products great.

A Brief Timeline

• November 6, 2024: Visited the Apple Store in Turin with my then new iPad Air 11" M2 experiencing significant lag and overheating when using Notes and Freeform with Apple Pencil Pro.
• November 13, 2024: Received a replacement unit after store representatives suggested a hardware swap.
• February 27, 2025: The replacement unit is now having identical performance issues.

Premium Hardware, Struggling Software

In November, I visited the Apple Store in Turin to address persistent issues with my iPad Air 11" M2 running iPadOS 18.1. Despite having cutting-edge hardware, I've been experiencing significant lag when using basic Apple applications like Notes and Freeform.

The performance issues don't stop at sluggish response times. During these use cases, my iPad overheated, making it uncomfortable to hold or even rest the palm on, raising concerns about potential long-term hardware damage.

What made this particularly frustrating is that these aren't third-party applications pushing the hardware to its limits. These are Apple's own applications that should be theoretically optimized for their hardware.

After demonstrating the issues in person to Apple Store staff (that were courteous and professional), the support representative that was handling my case suggested a hardware replacement.
However, after further discussion, we both concluded this was likely a software problem rather than a hardware defect.

I think this highlights a growing challenge for Apple's support model: how do you troubleshoot software issues when the traditional solution has been to replace hardware?

I think this experience feels symptomatic of a broader decline in Apple's software quality.

My replacement iPad Air 11" M2 with the Apple Pencil Pro is once again struggling with the same basic tasks. Despite multiple iPadOS updates since my original complaint (we're now on 18.3.1), the fundamental issues remain:

• Significant lag when using Apple's own Notes and Freeform applications: Input latency increases dramatically after about 5-10 minutes of use, with stroke rendering delayed by up to 5 seconds;
• Device overheating during standard usage scenarios: CPU temperatures reach concerning levels (based on device's external heat) during pencil input;
• Poor responsiveness with the Apple Pencil Pro: Palm rejection fails intermittently, and pressure and roll sensitivity becomes inconsistent.

This recurrence with a replacement device (and other friend's iPads) confirms what I and the support representative suspected last November - this is a software optimization problem, not a hardware defect.

Details Worth Noting

Since my original complaint, I've discovered numerous forum threads and social media discussions from iPad users experiencing similar issues. This suggests a systemic problem rather than isolated incidents.

I think these are sympthoms of two main problems:

• Thermal Management Issues: The SoC should throttle performance before reaching high external temperatures;
• Memory Management Problems: The gradual degradation in performance makes me think of memory leaks or improper garbage collection in Apple's Note and Freeform applications.

Most concerning is that multiple software updates have failed to address these performance issues while introducing new features that add more strain to the system (like Apple Intelligence, but that's a story for another day).

Reconsidering the "Apple Tax"

For years, many of us have willingly paid the "Apple tax", the premium price for Apple products justified by superior user experience, design, and ecosystem integration. But if software quality continues to decline, this value proposition becomes increasingly difficult to defend.

The persistence of these issues through multiple software updates suggests:

1. Feature prioritization over optimization: Engineering resources appear focused on adding new capabilities rather than fixing existing performance problems;
2. Inadequate performance testing: Real-world usage scenarios with Apple's own applications aren't being adequately tested.

As customers paying premium prices for Apple products, we at least deserve:

1. Transparency: Acknowledgment of known performance issues;
2. Focus on fundamentals: Updates focused on performance and stability;
3. Extended support: Consideration for extended warranties when software issues impact hardware lifespan.

The Apple experience was once defined by the words "it just works".
Today, that promise feels hollow as software struggles to keep pace with hardware capabilities. As users and customers, we need to vocally advocate for the quality-focused Apple we once knew.

After months of hoping for improvement, I'm faced with difficult decisions about my future in the Apple ecosystem. This issue, along with several others, albeit smaller, ones, has severely damaged my confidence in new Apple products.

Apple should return to its roots - creating products that prioritize user experience over feature creep. Apple needs to reclaim that ethos.