People are using iPad OS features on their iPhones

I have an 11" iPad and the screen still feels too small to use windowed apps. It gets very cramped very quickly.

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.

It might not be super practical on the device display. But with external display and keyboard/mouse this becomes much more usable.

Honestly a dex competitor would really help keep me in the Apple ecosystem.

With the power of M-chips, this would cannabalize MacBooks via iPad Air / Pro. They are sitting on a golden cash flow and not willing to revolutionize computing again (as the iPhone did).

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.

But Mac sales pale in comparison to iPhone, and are similar to iPad numbers. So whatever revenue they would lose by not selling Macs with macOS, they could easily make up from additional sales of iPhones and iPads with macOS.

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.