> Non-technical users can stay in the walled garden of the Mac App Store, semi-technical users can allow signed binaries, and power users can run whatever they want.

As the signed binary and app store only is the default, it's unlikely that non-technical users will actually change it.

To put it another way, to have the knowledge required to change the default, the non-technical user would have to become a semi-technical user.

To be honest, in custom software spaces like yours, I'm surprised that iOS was ever a platform of consideration.

I also make mobile medical software. When we evaluated potential tablets three years ago, all the available android tablets were pretty terrible. Especially since we wanted to prevent long-term lock-in by writing most of our application as Javascript / HTML5. iPad was very far ahead in Javascript & HTML rendering performance.

Android seems to have caught up quite a bit, but now we have momentum behind iOS. We could switch without too much difficulty, but we're in no rush to start supporting a second platform.

4 years ago what was the only decent tablet option? The iPad.

Apple's solution for running business apps and distributing them outside the app store is actually not that bad.

This is exactly my problem. I have an iPad 2. I know that if I move off iOS5 I have to move to iOS7, which really wasn't designed with the iPad 2 in mind.

I'm now stuck between a rock and a hard place. Stay where I am and many apps (like Spotify which I pay for) no longer work, or upgrade to iOS7 and know that the iPad 2 just isn't powerful to run it in the same way in runs iOS5 (for which it was designed for).

I'm desperately waiting for a jailbreak so I can install iOS6, which I see as a half way house.

The reality is that Apple are deliberately degrading older devices, in order to make them obsolete. Of course I understand they are just building software that is designed to run on the most current and powerful of their devices, but the deliberate prevention of installs of older iOS versions when a user specifically wants it is frustrating.

In hindsight I shouldn't have bought an iPad, but there wasn't a viable alternative at the time.

I'd tend to disagree with your assessment of iOS' performance on the iPad 2. I have an iPad Air and an iPad 2 and quite frankly the iPad 2 crashes less and runs more consistently on iOS 7, as opposed to my Air. It feels as though iOS 7 wasn't ready for the Air, but it has been improving with each update.

because the consideration was "oh, everybody has and is familiar with iOS devices, we'll waste less time training them and they won't make as much mistake poking around."

GateKeeper will not arrive on iOS, rather the converse will happen. Apple will lock down OSX. You will need a developer license to install 'non-approved' software. The success of iOS has demonstrated to them that people like velvet handcuffs. If you have any interest in open platforms you should not be giving Apple your money, and should be doing what you can to explain the dangers to others.

See, that’s what FOSS zealots keep telling me, but I don’t buy it. The day Apple jails the Mac is the day they turn OS X into OS Xcode, because that’s the only professional software people will use on it anymore.

Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, and other enterprise companies will never agree to a 30% Apple cut for their Mac software, and Apple will never allow their kludgily-accreted codebases onto the App Store. Apple’s executive team may have the balls to cut all these companies out of the platform, but they’re not stupid.

>without a mercurial third party deciding what we can and can’t do.

Isn't that Apple?