I’ll be interested to see what they have in store for the next iPadOS at WWDC. I fully anticipate them continuing to underutilize the horsepower of the Pros
8GB of memory on your base model was ridiculous half a decade ago, it's a crime in 2024.
I'd also say a quarter of a terabyte is nowhere near enough storage for a computer a quarter of the cost.
I'm not a Mac hater, the (non-baseline with recent revisions) MBP line has been pretty fantastic for as long as I've been using them (over a decade now), but the baseline non-pro models are a waste of money.
My Mini at work has 8gb that I can’t upgrade, and honestly, the only time it’s ever a real issue is when I’m running a Win11 VM that eats up half the RAM.
However, with the cost of RAM now, speccing 8gb on any £1000+ computers is downright criminal.
iPadOS feels like a real bottleneck for the iPad Pro line now. All that horsepower but limited room to gallop.
I’m not an advocate of putting macOS on iPads, but iPadOS really needs to expand more, especially for things like file management and multitasking. Multiple audio channels when?
I’ve seen some people speculating based on the new Magic Keyboard having an Esc key that something dev friendly is coming so who knows.
macOS is really not optimised for touch though. macOS on a 13 inch iPad with a keyboard and trackpad attached would probably be usable, albeit with limited IO. But trying to use macOS with just fingers isn't going to be much fun, especially for more complicated software.
Personally I'd rather see Apple further develop iPadOS as a touch first productivity OS, and leave macOS for the Mac.
Maybe if Apple opens up the App Store rules (willingly or not) more eventually virtualisation will be possible on an iPad, allowing people to DIY a macOS-on-iPad setup if they really wanted to.