Right, but the inability to do serious software development is an arbitrary limit imposed by Apple. The hardware is quite capable, but the vendor has decided that we need to use multiple different devices. It's their platform and they can do what they like with it, but as a customer those artificial limitations rankle.

They’d have to do something more than just throw XCode on it for it to be in any way usable without full on keyboard and mouse, which would cut against what they’re trying to do. So there is some justification beyond just market segmentation.

Why? Having xcode usable just with (their 350€+) keyboard seems perfectly acceptable.

For the same reason they deliberately made iphone apps look bad -- they want applications designed to work with the device to make it a good experience and not applications designed for something else shoehorned in. I see some real wisdom in this approach considering how poor some of the alternative experiences are. Ultimately why would you buy it if it's just an inferior laptop with a touchscreen that you can detach?

> Ultimately why would you buy it if it's just an inferior laptop with a touchscreen that you can detach?

Right now it’s inferior not-a-laptop with a touchscreen that you can detach and people still buy it.

Not really. It’s instead a different device offering an experience that doesn’t require a keyboard or mouse at all.

Why would it become worse if they add support for keyboard and mouse on top of it?

It does offer support for a keyboard and a mouse but what you're proposing is adding features or programs that would only work (or at least only work well) with a keyboard and a mouse, which would be a pretty big departure from the current design of the device.

If they don’t take anything from general experience, why do you care? Core of the system will still be touch oriented.

I am contesting the idea that it's possible to compromise the design philosophy that had guided it up till now and NOT "take anything from the general experience."

> Ultimately why would you buy it if it's just an inferior laptop with a touchscreen that you can detach?

For the same reason you carry an "inferior" camera, pda, navigation system, cellphone with very short battery life and undersized movie screen: a smartphone does all that okay-ishly. Or why ultrabooks are vastly more popular than gaming laptops. Convenience and form factor trump "inferior" all the time.

If you have to use the keyboard for certain tasks and so basically must always keep it attached to one it’s now heavier and more awkward than a MacBook Air. So you’re making my point here.

You still hit weird limits. Perhaps the M1 is a better value proposition now, but with the A series transcoding videos was choppy at best, and you'd have to choose to "share" them to VLC every damn time.

Youtube playback would stop everytime another video starts playing somewhere (additional fun when it's just a video ad that actually had no sound in the first place).

SMB file management is still an afterthought, so you end up needing a plex server dealing with all the complexity the iPad can't deal with.

Browsing is the same, outside of the Safari limitation, extensions are few and tab management a pain in general.

For books and magazine it's kinda the same. It works fine for light use. It becomes frustrating if it's something you actually care about.

In the end, I realized I actually care less about visual polish and more about having complete functionalities, at the price of dealing with Windows and managing a computer instead of an appliance.

I believe you but in the end I use it a lot more than my laptop despite its limitations and generally don’t want to try and do the things you’re talking about with it (I’d probably be sitting at my desk with my real computer if I wanted to).