iOS 9 review: great multitasking support for newer iPads, searchable Settings, proactive Siri not as useful as Google Now
iOS 9, thoroughly reviewed — Apple gives the iPad a lot of love as iOS goes back into spit-and-polish mode. — iOS 8 wasn't the smoothest operating system rollout in Apple's history.
Context & Ripple Effects
Coming off iOS 8 — which Ars Technica itself called far from Apple's smoothest rollout — iOS 9 is a consolidation release: searchable Settings, proactive Siri, and, most consequentially, real split-screen-style multitasking reserved for newer iPads. The catch in this review is that Apple's assistant work still trails Google Now, leaving the intelligence layer half-built while the windowing layer lands.
The iPad focus is the story's forward hook. Two months later, the same outlet's iPad Pro review would fault the expensive new hardware precisely for suffering iOS 9's limitations, and by 2017 the follow-up iOS 11 review framed that release as the 'stepping-stone towards a full-fledged productivity OS' that iOS 9 only gestured at.
First-order effects
- Owners of newer iPads get desktop-style multitasking and faster Settings navigation immediately, making the tablet materially more viable as a work device without any hardware change.
- Siri users gain proactive suggestions that reviewers judge less useful than Google Now's, so iPhone and iPad owners seeking anticipatory assistance have a concrete reason to look at Google's app instead.
Second-order effects
- Apple's own premium hardware becomes constrained by its software: the imminent iPad Pro ships with excellent performance that iOS 9 cannot fully exploit, pressuring the next iOS cycle to close the gap.
- The Google Now comparison puts competitive pressure on Siri ahead of later releases, a thread that runs through subsequent reviews' assessments of what the assistant actually delivers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — and it does across the coverage — Apple settles into a cadence where iPad hardware leads and iPadOS follows: iOS 15 brings 'quality-of-life updates' but 'no big iPad productivity leaps', and even iOS 18 ships despite 'missing upcoming AI features'. A decade of polish-mode releases rather than a single leapfrog moment.
- That cadence structurally positions the iPad as a product line whose value depends on each year's OS increment, keeping upgrade pressure on both software and hardware buyers rather than resolving it.
The trend: Apple's iPad strategy has become a long grind of software catching up to hardware ambition, with each iOS release adding incremental productivity capability rather than delivering one decisive laptop-replacement leap.