Because their experience (and probably livelihood) rests with iOS apps. No one is buying an iPad hoping that some day they can write kernel patches on it. If you make your money off an ecosystem, you are going to buy hardware for that ecosystem.

Yes, it's what most people want. As a developer, I do not miss the days of trying to drive people to my website to find my app. If you were lucky you could get a mention on a well-known website or one of the many download aggregators, but it was hit and miss. The Mac had some very good ones, but with Windows, not one was big enough to be worth your time. It was a nightmare. Getting noticed on the app store is non-trivial, but at least your product is already in the place where users are going to find stuff. It's one less thing to have to worry about.

As a user, I don't miss having to search the general web to find something for my computer, only to be misled by poor results in the search engine, malware download sites, software that would be the perfect solution but doesn't run on my OS, ads everywhere, etc. Now I have one place to go and everything on it works with my system. Sure it's not perfect, and discovery could be improved, but there's no malware that I've ever run into, and everything I actually need is there.

Also, it's a false dichotomy between PC OSes and iOS. Both macOS and Windows have app stores that their users use.

Because the Bazaar is grating.

Out here in the free world, every time you want to use a library, you have to choose between 12 different options, all suck in one way or another, and you really have no way of making an informed choice. So you pick something by gut feel. Half the time you are wrong, and all of the time you worry that you have made the wrong choice.

But if you buy into Apple's cathedral, they tell you what to use, and you use it. End of story. It's always behind the times, and it won't run outside of Apple's stuff, but it works (for now, at least), it's well documented, and you don't have to spend days finding and comparing solutions. You can get back to writing code, which is the fun part.

Is it good business? Good for the world? Maybe not. But it's certainly attractive.

I would love it if there were an app like Termux for iOS (if there is, and I’ve missed it, please let me know!). On Android, Termux lets you use the local command line in some sort of chroot where you can install packages with apt. If this were made available to iPad users and it integrated well with Xcode (one of the issues with sandboxing), it wouldn’t be very far off from the macOS experience.

Yes, because this walled gardens offer us very nice tooling similar to the Xerox PARC days of yore, instead of lego pieces that we need to sort out new every year, while offering sandboxes that actually protect $HOME from random apps.

I like my mouse too much for this to be possible.

Selecting/moving text with a finger is more annoying.

>That may be why it hasn't happed yet as many of us probably feel that way.

I don't know about that; one of Apple's hallmarks is that they aren't afraid to compete with their own products. Some companies would have said "We can't make the tablet into a powerful computer, it would cut into notebook sales.

Especially with the USB-C change, these iPads are a serious competitor to Apple's laptops for pretty much anyone except developers. In a lot of ways they're better. Just not for programming because the software is still too sandboxed.

Here's hoping that Xcode shows up.

Same here. Especially with the new hardware from this year. Apple puts a ton of engineering into these new iOS devices, a little sad that the Mac lines don't really get the same treatment.

I feel we are insanely close to this reality though. We have large enough displays now (even on the small one), external display support, external keyboard support and USB-C so we can actually plug in an iPhone into the iPad itself (Though this could have been skirted with the advent of wireless debugging support in Xcode. I'd still rather have the wire though.) Only thing I really want is some kind of trackpad or trackpad replacement. Or even just mouse support and I'll drop one in my bag.

Xcode would need a shitload of polishing to approach the stability and UX standards of an iOS application. I desperately wish they would have a few release cycles of pure stabilisation work.

I will be good with a wireless trackpad.