Arbitrary is doing a lot of work. With MacOS you can use an iPad as a touchscreen external monitor. Try it and you’ll learn that it’s not a touchscreen OS. It’s not as simple as “not letting you”.

Maybe it doesn't have a touchscreen interface, but i take issue with it being a touchscreen OS. I suspect most people who would want to run MacOS on an ipad would attach the appropriate user interface devices.

Like a keyboard and trackpad, yes, and the battery would be in the base, and…

or...plug into usb and use the ipad battery. the ipad already has a battery. Just don't limit what software you could load, that's all that's being asked here.

uhuh except ipad keyboards with trackpads are an existing accessory

They could have a lean version of the macOS desktop on every iPhone where it would switch to the macOS desktop once you plug it into a display. Include iWork on both sides with shared storage and you could switch between the phone interface and macOS.

I mean Samsung DeX has done something similar, but Apple could make a much more powerful version, since they have a real fully-developed desktop and they have apps for both platforms that use a single code base.

They will, of course, never do this, because it would result in losing Mac sales. Though I think less than one would initially think, because a laptop is much handier on the go than carrying a separate display, keyboard, and mouse and the lapdocks or whatever they are called have much worse displays and keyboards.

I have long wished for a future when I could just plug my phone into a KVM and have a full desktop experience.

Samsung DEX isn't far off from this, it's just that you're limited to Android instead of Linux, MacOS etc.

But Apple will surely never allow such a thing since their main interest is in selling as many pieces of hardware to each of the Apple Faithful as possible. So they with a straight face suggest that a single human needs an iPad Pro (which easily tops $1500 with the eye-wateringly-expensive keyboard and a storage upgrade) and a laptop. Nevermind that they may have the same chip inside.

I own too many Apple devices, so I may unintentionally qualify as one of those Apple Faithful, but even so I can't really find a place for the iPad in my life. I've tried, I do own an old iPad Pro, but it is semi-permanently mounted to my treadmill as the only use case I've ever had that sticks. As a practical matter I either want my phone, or a real desktop computer.

Something like that Samsung DEX with a real Linux OS and maybe I'm getting a new phone.

>"Samsung DEX isn't far off from this"

I have the latest and greatest and can attest that the experience is atrocious

I use it on a 4-5 year old Galaxy tablet. it's not perfect, but it's miles beyond the "multitasking" iPads have offered. Disclosure: I haven't tried Apple's 97th attempt to invent a new and alien alternative to the concept of windows that they currently ship on iPads.

>"but it's miles beyond the "multitasking" iPads have offered"

I do not use Apple products so I was comparing it to a regular PC/Laptop

I understand - I just mentioned because for me I was aiming to replace the concept of an iPad in my life with that tablet. Honestly though, I ended up inheriting an M1 MacBook Air from my wife after upgrading her, and it has mostly displaced the tablet for most of the uses. Mainly because of the keyboard, and it's just nicer to be able to actually access the filesystem, and indeed, just window management is still superior on a "real" OS.

Microsoft tried to sell it as a promise of Windows Phone 10. It mostly worked just around the time that Microsoft killed Windows Phone.

I do that with my Pinephone (a powered USB-C hub with ethernet, HDMI, keyboard and mouse; I also plug a proper set of speakers+subwoofer into headphone jack).

Both Phosh and PlasmaMobile turn into a "proper" desktop when "docked" (Gnome-like and KDE-like, respectively).

I don't want the phone os on a screen but the phone is powerful enough to run a full linux VM and work well-enough as a good desktop.