I'm guessing you're talking about the MBA and not the iPad Air. On iPads it's quite different where the screen produces a lot of heat at peak brightness especially the 12in Pros, and there isn't much that can be done passively to limit that. Given the high res, high refresh rate displays and its proximity to warm skin, I would wager the thermal envelope of the vision pro is a lot more similar to the iPad. By the looks of the side vents the vision pro probably already requires active cooling running just visionOS. If you run macOS on top, it would need something extra so it wouldn't overheat.
You're right about the ipad, but your analysis is wrong. The heat from that ipad isn't going to be concentrated down into the little screens in the Vision. Most of the heat comes from the LEDs illuminating, not the logic. They're physically smaller in the Vision and so give off correspondingly less heat. (I don't know the %ages, and would be curious to hear from someone with actual data about this. Does 3% of the surface area of the ipad translate to ~3% of the heat? Or 6%? or...)
Adding MacOS idling will not change things all that much. You're already paying idle costs on the M2 (which are pretty small); the incremental compute cost for running MacOS is just not that high. And when it's not idling, it's doing stuff you want done anyway, so you'd be doing it native if not in MacOS. So not much change there either.
The Vision does have active cooling; it draws in air from below (and presumably expels at the top though I don't know that for certain yet).
The advantage of a laptop on a flight really comes from the fact that it's one piece and rigid. Economy tray tables are usually about the size of a 16" MBP. That's really not enough space for both a keyboard and a mouse horizontally. Laptops are nice because you can have it hang off the edge a little without worry and the trackpad is built in. As for the assistive pointer, it's very similar to what the HoloLens and Quest Pro headsets do with hand tracking. It's fine for a click on a big button once in a while, but doing something that needs a lot of precise clicking like moving the cursor in a word processor would be a huge PITA since you need to aim in mid-air and hold the position while performing a click gesture.
Dunno what economy flights you're on; my 13" MBA more than fills the tray tables I've used recently. More to the point, because the screen is up, the laptop takes up a substantial *volume*, not just surface area. A kbd/trackpad, much much less volume. (This matters especially when the person in front of you reclines their seat!)
The assistive pointer won't be good enough for everything but it will suffice for some use cases. For the rest, you bring a trackpad. Different levels of (sub)optimality are inevitable.
You're right that it's debatable. It might even be better for sales in the short term. But the point is that the iPad apps would be as nice to use as Android tablets apps even today if not for Apple limiting iPhone apps when they launched iPad. The holdouts who are still only on macOS are the pro apps that haven't adapted their apps for iPad. Apple probably wants as many of them running natively as possible since they are position vision pro as the future of computing.
Hm. In what way did Apple limit iphone apps, such that it had such a driving impact? I feel they did way more pulling (creating opportunity) than pushing.
Pushing sales might be overridingly important in building enough of an installed base to encourage development. (I don't actually think so but it's plausible.)
For those less intensive scenarios, I'm sure it'll be totally fine. But then those scenarios are also already well-served by iOS/iPadOS/visionOS. If my work didn't need any type of dev tools or design apps, I can totally already do all of my work on the iPad. The tasks that you need a Mac for is usually either multi-tasking heavy or performance heavy, which means that in turn, the vision pro would need to have more performance for macOS to be useful on it.
I think the advantage of Vision over ipad is the vastly larger display area/volume, and potentially much less restricted interface. Compute power matters for some people, but not all. Maybe not even the majority.
In the end, the cross section of people who would buy this for the built-in macOS would be limited to those who 1) need very limited computing power yet whose needs are not fulfilled by visionOS/iOS apps, 2) has enough budget to purchase something that has significantly less performance for a much larger amount of money, 3) okay with keeping it plugged in all the time or carrying a huge power bank, 4) never need to show other people the screen they are working on or plug into anything to present, 5) okay with noisier cooling or a heavier/larger device. All that in exchange for not carrying a MBA alongside the headset. I'm sure these users exist, but I find it hard to believe that there are enough to justify a whole sub product line for them, especially at a higher price.
For the reasons expressed above, I think you're dramatically underestimating the Vision's capability - each of those factors covers some real-world cases, but not nearly as many as you think. Perhaps if we're lucky, we'll find out if you're right.
