Yes, all the cash begins to smell after a while... especially after all the Exec daily swims in it.

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Blame those developers for that. Apparently people who spends upwards of days, months or years coding apps wish to- are you sitting down?- get paid for their work. Fools. That's outrageous! Ripoff. Crooks. How dare people want to get paid for the work they do. They should do it voluntarily. Only Apple deserves money.
In case there is some confusion, ads allow apps to be purchased for as little as free... and the creator of the ad still gets paid. Instead of coming out of our pockets, the money comes from the advertiser... some strangers pay your bill.
Kill the ads and the only way the developer gets paid is by the money coming out of consumer pockets. That won't be the $1 or $2 or so that we generally perceive to be the price of apps. Instead, that would probably flip the price of software apps back to historical norms. When ANY app maker other than Apple (who can do no wrong) tries to do that, we practically flip out with the "how dare theys?" if they price the app much above above $5 or $10.
Suggestion: lead by example. Go to work and tell your boss you don't want to be paid anymore. Do YOUR job for free. Because the end user of whatever you produce doesn't want to pay anything or more than a $1 or two for whatever you produce too. And they sure don't want your production to come with ads either. So do your work for free for them. Who needs money (besides Apple of course)?
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While I'm 110% behind improving iOS with both missing features and bug fix focuses- even more so by giving some tangible focus to maxing out the unique benefits available on bigger (tablet) screens- that last bit of "potential replacement for macOS" is pretty much terrifying to me. If one has to "replace" the other, I'd rather it go the other way.
IMO: keep them
separate and evolve them accordingly (not necessarily toward some future merger, but making the most of them as individual OSes so that iDevices can become all that they can become and Macs can become all that they can become). Unification where iOS basically becomes THE OS is- IMO- the day that Macs finally die... and the replacement that looks like new Macs is really just iPad++ with a keyboard.
I can look at Surface Pros and maybe see some kind of approximate analog but I doubt I would want an Apple version of that to be the ONLY classic computer-like device available to me. If Macs are "trucks," we still need trucks. Better trucks. Smarter trucks. Faster trucks. There's nothing wrong with having cars, trains, planes, cycles, buses, ships AND trucks in the world. So many options exist because each plays a unique role that "just works" for their users. You don't see those who lean on- say- mack trucks wanting to do away with them and try to do their shipping in thinner & lighter Miata's. In Apple's case, you don't see Apple trying to ship the next new <whatever> from China a few at a time in the thinner <car> because who needs trucks/planes/ships anymore?
Speaking of the analog, note that Surface has delivered some merged Windows platform that way for a few years now... but desktop and laptop "trucks" still sell very well. Apparently users can't all make Surface the one-and-only way to go for them. I don't suspect it would be any different with some kind of iOS Mac (Surface) device. Could some use and love such a product? Almost certainly. But all? I don't think so.