Maybe the end game for Apple isn’t the full convergence, but just having a touch screen on the Mac.
Not much point having a touchscreen on a Macbook (or any laptop really), unless the hardware has a 'tablet mode' with a detachable or fold-away keyboard.
There are plenty of laptops that do have touchscreens, and it has always felt more like a gimmick than a useful hardware interface.
Honestly, the biggest barrier to creativity is thinking you need a specific concept of a "serious workstation" to do it. Plenty of people are using $2k+ desktops just to play video games.
Then there's the whole dealing with lots of files and version control side of things, essential for working as part of a team. Think about creating (and previewing, and finally uploading) a very simple web page, just HTML and a couple of images, entirely on an iPad. While it's probably quite possible these days, I suspect the workflow would be abysmal compared to a 'proper computer' where the file system isn't hidden from you and where you're not constantly switching between full-screen apps.
And that's before you start dealing with anything with significant numbers of files in deep directory structures, or doing more technical image creation (e.g. dealing with alpha channels). And of course, before testing your webpage on all the major browsers. Hmm...
It's rather disingenuous to pretend that an iPad can be sufficient. At its price tag it is still a rather extremely expensive accessory and people pretending otherwise are just full of it. There are enough reviews/testimonies saying as much (even from the diehard fans) for it to be an obvious fact.
Respectfully, I disagree partially. It has never been easier or more affordable to get into creating content. You can create cinema grade video with used cameras that sell for a few hundred dollars. You can create pixar level animation on open source software, and a pretty cheap computer. A computer that can edit a 4k video costs less than the latest iPhone. There are people that create plenty of content with just a phone. Simply put it is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to create content than it was less than two decades ago, which is why we are seeing so much content getting made. I used to work for a newspaper and it used to be a lot harder and more expensive to produce audio visual media.
My strong feeling is that the problem of content being locked into platforms has precious little to do with consumption oriented hardware, and more to do with the platforms. Embrace -> extinguish -> exlcusivity -> enshittify seems to be the model behind basically anything that hosts user content these days.
This is a completely artificial creation by Apple and Google to extract more money from you. Nothing technical prevents one from using a full OS on a phone today.
Sent from my Librem 5 running desktop GNU/Linux.
We now have 'content consumption platforms' and 'content creation platforms'.
While attempts have been made to try and enable some creation on locked-down touchscreen devices, you're never going to want to try and operate a fully-featured version of Photoshop, Maya, Visual Studio, etc on them. And if you've got a serious workstation with multiple large monitors and precision input devices, you don't want to have dumbed-down touch-centric apps forced upon you Win8-style.
The bleak future that seems likely is that the 'content creation platforms' become ever more niche and far more costly. Barriers to entry for content creators are raised significantly as mainstream computing is mostly limited to locked-down content consumption platforms. And Linux is only an option for as long as non-locked-down hardware is available for sensible prices.