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firelock said:

If Apple offers this it will be essentially a “desktop” iPad aimed at artist studios, designers, architects, etc.

Yeah, at which point it simply should run macOS.
If you want to run iPad apps, there’s Catalyst and full-screen-mode.
The whole point of the restrictive touchUI is gone once screen sizes go up.

It’s one thing to warn people against the practice, it’s another to prohibit people from doing something on devices they own.

if I wanted to install Android on my iPhone (not that I ever wanted to) I should be able to do it: it’s my damn hardware.

Apple can warn against a practice, refuse software support for devices with sideloaded apps, etc. but prohibiting, is another matter.

Having used NeXTstep (aka macOS, iOS, Darwin) since version 0.8 I’d like to e.g. run a NeXT emulation software. With a “huge” hard drive back then being 8GB (split in four 2GB partitions) and a lot of RAM being 128MB, emulating a NeXT cube and running legacy software is something the iPad Pro can do without breaking a sweat. But it’s not possible without side loading and even that was sabotaged in the latest iOS releases. For no good reason, on a device of that class. Running things well isolated in a virtual machine isn’t or shouldn’t be a security risk.

Heck even running virtualized macOS or Windows should not be an issue, that’s the whole point of virtual machines. Heck, Apple could run a virtual iOS session for third-party apps, totally isolated from the AppStore side of things.

The excuses Apple brings for saving its revenue stream are transparent and invalid, at least as far as the latest crop of devices and their powerful hardware is concerned.

What needs to end is either the walled garden or the AppStore monopoly, it should also be possible to delete Apple’s apps to free up storage, not just hide them.

It should also be possible for the user to let apps access hardware info, but it should require user consent and be tied to apps with strict privacy policies.

In other words the restrictions on what sort of apps users may run on their own hardware need to go; but not Apple’s ability to provide an integrated solution.

The HomePod’s failure is purely a marketing failure.

For a mono smart speaker/voice assistant it’s too expensive and overpriced….

….BUT as a stereo pair for music listening and AirPlay2 target, it’s awesome. And for that it never was too expensive either: any comparatively good sounding pair of active speakers or passive speakers plus amplifier, costs at least as much, and likely needs a subwoofer or needs to be considerably bigger to get as low and tight a bass.

Apple should have sold and promoted stereo pairs with two in a box. Maybe that’s the only way it should have been sold, as for little mono speakers and voice assistants around the house, the HomePod mini are sufficient.

I only ever bought or recommend them as pairs, either for not-too-big living rooms, offices, bedrooms, with or without aTVs. And they shine in that role and were always a decent value for the money.

The HomePod is not a product failure, it’s a marketing failure: anyone who cares about sound will want stereo pairs, anyone who doesn’t won’t pay the price of one/two HomePods. Yet the ability to couple them as stereo pairs was neither pushed nor advertised, you had to find it in the small print or a FAQ. 

I own an iPad since the first model that Apple brought to market. I justified the purchasing prices for my by now three iPads (original, Air, Pro), by comparing it with the cost, weight, bulk and hassle of producing, maintaining and carrying paper photo albums vs. carrying an iPad.

Everything else, like watching Netflix in bed, jotting down a note, or quickly checking an e-mail, are fringe benefits. Despite the latest iPad of mine being a 12” A12X based iPad Pro with 1TB of storage, it NEVER was more for me than a photo album and media consumption device, and certainly NOTHING that deserved the name Pro, not even for something as trivial as e-mail does it deserve that name, for what sort of “Pro” solution is an e-mail system that doesn’t allow the user to inspect a messages RAW content to see if something is real or an elaborate phishing e-mail? At best, it might qualify as a semi-pro accessory to a Mac, if one uses it as a Wacom Tablet replacement with Sidecar or some third party software like AirDisplay.

When the MagicKeyboard hit the market, it endeavored into an expensive experiment: would a MagicKeyboard change how I worked with the iPad Pro? Would a cigarette box sized Raspberry Pi 8GB RAM Linux system attached, networked and powered over the USB-C connection and operated over RDP, make up for some of the shortcomings of iPad OS (e.g. by running a real e-mail client like Thunderbird on the Raspberry, by having Mathematica on the Raspberry, by having development and network testing tools on the linux system, etc.)?

The answer was a resounding YES in both cases, but more importantly, it showed me that the iPad Pro with MagicKeyboard was the HARDWARE I always wished a MacBook Air would be: Much better screen, touch screen, pen input, etc. At the same time, the more I worked with the MagicKeyboard, the more painful the shortcomings of iPadOS became.

Yes, I get the difference between a mouse/trackpad&keyboard driven UI and a touch UI. I get that macOS is the former and iPadOS is the latter…
…BUT, branding aside, macOS and iPadOS are fundamentally the same OS (Darwin), with different UI layers. With the new iPad Pros (A12X and up with 6GB RAM or more) there is no hardware issue with running macOS. And just as macOS apps can have a windowed mode and a full screen mode, there’s nothing that stops the same app from in addition having a touch UI mode. So one could have an adaptive OS, which adjusts the UI based on whether docked with pointing device and keyboard, or used standalone in touch UI mode.

With the M1 version, and its up to 2TB of SSD and 16GB RAM, there could be even another solution: virtualization. Run macOS virtualized in an iPadOS app, and switch to it when docked, and suspend it when undocked. 

Even working on a slow-poke system like a Raspberry Pi “remotely” over USB-C and RDP makes the iPad Pro feel like a seamless laptop, that lets me miss nothing (except for macOS rather than Linux), so how much better would a virtualized macOS be, that would run at nearly native speed, and would gain tablet input, and instant switching between iPadOS and macOS? How cool would it be to run Xcode on the virtualized macOS system, and then test the app directly on the iPad?

It would be awesome, beyond words. And what would Apple have to do to make this possible? Nothing. Less than nothing. All they would need to do is to stop actively sabotaging virtualization apps on iPadOS, and a third party solution would spring up in short order.

Now, why is Apple getting in its own way?

The answer is easy: they don’t have “software and hardware divisions”, which if they did, they wouldn’t care which of their operating systems you ran on which of their hardware devices, but they have “Mac, iDevice, aTV, etc. divisions”, and so the Mac division has no interest in driving iDevice sales by spending man hours making their software available on the competing division’s hardware, while digging their own hardware’s grave. The video of how the iPad division went to steal the M1 chip from the Mac division, was in a strange way revealing of why we have the problems as Pro users with the iPad Pro and its media consumption platform operating system.