I can't imagine trying to do that on an iPhone. Surely it's useless.
What this does do is reveal the fiction that "iPadOS" and "iOS" are separate. Clearly not.
When there's a will you'll be glad there's a way.
People used to make do with "tiny" screens throughout the 1980s and 1990s: Bigger displays sure but smaller resolutions Han the iPhone. Doom came out in 320x200 ffs
When traveling I've had to do all sorts of tricks to use various services while away from home. Like my bank app which set an OTP to email or SMS, but if you swiped out of the app to go check the message, it would generate a new OTP when you switched back to the bank app. So I had to check my mail/messages on the minuscule Apple Watch screen. And that was the only time I ever used email on the Watch but I was infinitely glad that it had that option.
Screen isn't much bigger than an iPhone Pro Max, if at all, but I was able to adapt to the desktop GUIs without much trouble.
Technically, I don’t think anybody ever claimed they were 100% distinct. Apple, for instance, says (https://developer.apple.com/ipados/get-started/): “Powered by the iOS SDK, your iPadOS apps”, and they’ve touted the ability to build apps that ru on both iPhone and iPad.
marketing-wise, they clearly are separate, in the same sense as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_platform: “A car platform is a shared set of common design, engineering, and production efforts, as well as major components, over a number of outwardly distinct models and even types of cars, often from different, but somewhat related, marques.”
The only difference is that here, Apple apparently ships all or major parts of the special parts for the iPad on iOS, too. Maybe they also do that vice versa? Can you enable the calculator app on iPad with this method?
Just as a N=1, I would rather pay a recurring fee in the Disney-Netflix range to Apple to get more liberty in usage from my machines. But I think they don’t dare to go those routes, because they need the broad market base and cannot extract the current cash flow from a smaller base, while setting expectations that the Googles, Samsungs can copy.
Industry leaders dilemma. Apple currently settles on market differentiation via physical products.
Not saying you are wrong, this may be the reason Apple operates nowadays, but I maintain it is shortsighted.
Only for the truly low end. The thermals alone are a serious difference, you can't expect an iPad-class device to support the same power dissipation as a legit MacBook.
Two bits floating in my mind: I'm in management (different sector, totally different scale) and deciding to move forward against a market as a market leader is a really scary decision. We did and changed our proposition against a trend in the market. The market mostly followed our lead. Thats what we hoped for, but sure couldn't count on at the time of the decision. So we had to make sure to have all stakeholders involved in the risk - What if most of our customers just left? Then suppose you are in management for Apple. The stakes are massive. How would you communicate this shift?
The other one is: You should take the strength of your opposition into account when making bold moves. Android / Google / the brands fabricating the products I would say (no need for the old debate) are market followers. They are good at following and produce more technical diverse products, minus the margins. If you do not expect your opposition to make the bold move first, but do expect them to follow your bold move, I would argue you should be less likely to play bold moves unless you know they cannot follow you. So game theory I think also favors the status quo for Apple.
Replacing the MacBook + iPad with an iPhone + some dock accessories might reduce revenue per customer.
They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't. And to be fair, Apple has a much stronger position with a wider moat then they did back then. So they can afford to give more time to the competition to compete.
Besides, they've increasingly been expanding iPadOS to have more desktop-like features, so it wouldn't be far-fetched to offer full-blown macOS on these devices. It's not a hardware issue at all at this point.
Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs.
The more important thing that Apple would have to sacrifice is the App Store cash cow and users not having root rights. On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that, but on a machine I actually want to do work? No way in hell.
But that's it right here. It just takes boiling the frog slowly enough. The high powered M-powered iPads are already testing the waters of what people will accept for work (I don't think they're aimed purely at content consumption like the "smaller" iPads). I think Apple can afford to wait because they don't need to cannibalize anything today, and because the replacement isn't strictly a superset of what it's replacing, it comes with the caveats you mention. As soon as the market is ready to tolerate more lock-in, it might happen.
Enough people do just emails/Teams/Office for work so plugging in an iPhone and turning it into a desktop with mouse, keyboard, and external screen(s) can tick all the boxes for usability. Or an iPad with keyboard since similar sized devices were historically used for portability. Most work devices are locked down anyway, no root, no software installation.
The iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is just that and in my personal experience does very well even on shorter legs due to its weight distribution. Were Apple to go down the route of actually enabling Xcode, etc. on iPads, they'd likely invest a bit more into the ergonomics of course, but they are already there and not comparable to Lenovos efforts in that regard.
Xcode is huge, it’s bigger than most games. A lot of that size, is an aggregation of tools, built up over a couple of decades.
Replacing it with a rewrite, would be a major operation, but would probably be required, in order to work on iPad.
It stores that stuff in a different container.
[UPDATE:] I just looked at the contents.
The single biggest component is the toolchains (Swift, SourceKit, etc).
The next biggest components, are the platforms (which may be used to construct simulator images).
These are all wrapped into the app, itself.
I don't see why we cannot build an app that when connected to an external monitor switches to a "Desktop Environment". Maybe, even a hacked version of UTM[1] that exposes a fully functional OS on the monitor.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/presenting-c...
I suspect there are dozens of tools, that are years old, have very few folks that know how they work, and probably only work on Mac.