I'm not questioning whether the Ipad can be used as a client in some capacity, or whether people tend to use it as a client. I question whether the Ipad is a thin client. The answer to that question doesn't lie in how many applications require an internet connection, but in how many applications require local computational resources.

The Ipad is a high performance computer, not just because Apple think that's fun, but out of necessity given its ambition: the applications people use on it require local storage and rather heavy local computation. The web browser standards if nothing else have pretty much guaranteed that the age of thin clients is over: a client needs to supply a significant amount of computational resources and storage to use the web generally. Not even Chromebooks will practically be anything less than rich clients.

Going back to the original topic (and source of the analogy), IOS hosts an on-device large language model.

As with everything, the lines are a bit blurred these days. We may need a new term for these devices. But despite all the compute and storage and on-device models these supercomputers are barely a step above thin clients.