Apple must open iPadOS to sideloading within 6 months, EU says

The iPad App Store is perhaps an even more dysfunctional place than the iPhone in how much it holds hardware and use cases hostage to the manufacturer's vision. Just imagine how much more versatile the iPad Pro would be if only you could run Linux VMs on it in the moments you want to do anything remotely tinkery on an iPad.

Apple's hardware since the 2021 iPad Pro (with M1) has had the ability to do this. The iPads have the RAM (16gb on higher storage models), appropriate keyboard and trackpads, the works. Great hardware being held back by Apple's vision people weren't allowed to deviate from.

A straightforward reading of the DMA suggests that Apple is not allowed to restrict apps from using hardware features. Let's hope that means Parallels/VMware style VMs are possible without too much of a fight.

I don’t think versatile devices are possible. I love iPad Pro for what it is. I tried Surface Pro and it was a much inferior tablet experience, even though the device is more “versatile”. I just doing think that you can get an excellent tablet by trying to be a laptop at the same time.

It’s a screen. Add a regular Bluetooth keyboard mouse and you have a PC. There’s no compromise here from hardware perspective, it’s just software that’s in the way.