There aren’t that many people who want macOS. You’re living in a tech bubble with tech diehards who want to manipulate Terminal settings. The 99.9% of regular people like iPadOS just the way it is. They don’t want a Mac. They want the ultra portability and simplicity of iPadOS. IPadOS is just fine and doesn’t need any fundamental changes.
I've read a few variations of this argument over the years, and I just deeply disagree. Your argument basically boils down to "people who use the iPad as a consumption device in the way Steve Jobs originally introduced it (email, photos, ebooks, etc) don't have an issue with a lack of productivity features". Fine for iPad and iPad Air - those are not categories that anyone is complaining about. The issue comes with the iPad Pro and professional usage.
There are a few basic productivity tasks that, in my opinion, people should be able to do comfortably on an iPad Pro. Creative things like recording a podcast, editing and publishing YouTube or TikTok content, photography and graphic design at a professional level. Virtually every person I've read that has tried doing these things repeatedly using iPad Pro and iPadOS as their main tools has said there's too many limitations, and they're all over the place. There's a few that said it's doable if you really committed to the task, but it's definitely not as smooth as just doing it on Windows or macOS. These are type the tasks that Apple itself is actively marketing the iPad Pro for. Almost everyone that has tried using the tool for the thing Apple says the tool is built for says it doesn't work because of software.
There's other professional tasks that Apple hasn't explicitly marketed the iPad Pro for that I think should be possible on the platform as well: things like game development (or app development in general) or scientific modeling (like Matlab). There could be a natural progression path where people who grew up on iPhones could use iPads in the classroom and uni and actually stay on that platform when they need to start doing more serious computing. But now there is a point where everyone hits a glass ceiling in terms of what you can get done on the iPad, and needs to graduate towards macOS or Windows. And that's a shame on the one hand - and lost revenue for Apple on the other hand.
When I’ve surveyed people in the past, it isn’t iPadOS that people want a change to. They want to run Mac programs because they tend to be more mature than their iPad counterparts. That isn’t the OS. That’s the apps.
Blaming the apps and app developers is a cop-out. End users may say in a survey that they're fine with iPadOS but want more functionality out of the apps. But the whole reason the apps are limited in the first place is because iPadOS forces those limitations on the app developers.
If it would just be a few developers that chose to launch a more limited version of their app for iPadOS, the argument could work, then that would be on them. But if every single developer across the board runs into the same issues, the root cause doesn't sit with the individual devs, it sits with the overall platform design and Apple as its guardian.
So it’s not really iPadOS that people have a beef with. It’s that they own Mac programs they want to run. But consider this, people knock the MacBook Air for throttling and poor performance with high end Mac apps and consider the MacBook Air to be more of a casual consumer device. The iPad Pro is a lesser beast than even the MacBook Air with smaller battery and poorer thermals, yet people here want the iPad Pro to run software that would make an M3 Max MBP sweat.
So somehow apps that ran fine on an M1 MacBook Air (or going even further back, ran fine on years of Intel Macs) are too heavy for the M4 iPad Pro? Give me a break, this is not about hardware limitations like battery or thermals at all. It's not even about user experience or trade-offs between simplicity and productivity.
At the core of all of this discussion is Apple's monetisation model for all platforms post-iOS, including iPadOS. They're double-dipping on revenue per user by first selling you the hardware and then capturing additional recurring value through the App Store "service" revenue, also lovingly known as the "Apple tax". There's a whole ecosystem running on top of their platforms and they want a cut. Creating too much opennes on iPadOS would allow users to bypass App Store restrictions and jeopardise that model.
But here's the key thing that annoys me: the limitations that Apple puts in place to protect its service revenue cost users more than a few cents per app purchase - there's entire categories of tasks that are made more difficult or outright impossible just because Apple wants to keep everyone exactly within the confines of the walled garden model.
And the ironic thing is, it could actually work just fine. If they just did a better job at it. The lists of missing features that were recently written up by Jason Snell, Federico Viticci and Steve Troughton-Smith are pretty clear and pretty specific. There's nothing on there that Apple couldn't do if they decided to care enough, and they could get through most of it in just 1-2 years of OS iterations.
