Because of power. It may have "workstation tower processing" power, but it's not hooked up to a wall socket. Power consumption is the gigantic bugaboo that plagues mobile devices, and that (in my opinion) justifies Apple's policies about background processing on iOS.
All of us have experienced how much you want to tear your hair out over lag (especially in iTunes). I think iOS eases that experience because there only is so much you can do at once and you always feel like you're in control in an environment that Apple actually controls.
An iPhone that's smaller than my still-pocketable non-Apple phone isn't that appealing to me (yay for having above-average-sized hands!). An iPhone that could go a week easily on a single charge would make me sit up and take notice, though.
It's truly just an incredibly hard problem to solve.
There's no reason you shouldn't have the full uncrippled power of UNIX in the palm of your hand.
I couldn't stop laughing when I read this. There's probably a few reasons I can think of.
Good point, I have no idea why don't they just push to iOS devices on my account.
The primary reason I switched was that one day, I opened up my home screen and realized it hasn't changed in 5 years. We still open apps one at a time, each app allotted a sort of pseudo background API that allows minimal functionality. And God those apps are pretty. And the FPS is amazing. And the fluidity of the experience is breathtaking... but at the end of the day, my device is about acquiring information. I want to know when my train is coming, I want to save map info when I don't have a connection, I want to know that when I leave for work and hit the subway, Pocket auto downloaded all those articles I saved for later.
Apple still maintains the best hardware, hands down. It's not even comparable. But it's irrelevant if the apps that reside on that phone are completely crippled by a draconian sense of design and control. If the phone has a "workstation tower processor" inside it, why the hell can't they let up and let the thing actually PROCESS more information?
I'll miss the beauty of it, that's for sure, but unless Apple gets its act together with background processing and figuring out how to actually do cloud anything right, I'm moving to Google.