Is it just me, or does something seem horribly wrong with the world when your 4-digit-price-tag personal Unix computing device from the world's richest company needs a 5 dollar hobbyist board to be a useful Unix development environment?
This allows the maker of iPads to change the underlying implementation how they see fit, without making users notice anything. If iPads started to run a mickrokernel OS underneath, the UI / UX won't change at all.
The expensive parts of an iPad are the screen, the battery, the QA, and the brand. The CPU is not particularly expensive, though maybe isn't a $5 part.
Okay, and if people were buying 4-figure Bang and Olufsen stereo systems and hooking up a 5-dollar cassette recorder as their music production system, I'd be perturbed by that as well.
If it's merely a consumption device, why attempt to develop on it? If it's a serious tool, why is the $5 component needed? Most of all - why don't you have a device that actually does what you want it to, properly, and why doesn't this bother you?
Here’s Steve Jobs’ take: https://youtu.be/YfJ3QxJYsw8
The OS architecture, drivers being written in Objective-C, foundation frameworks had nothing UNIXy about them.
For them the iPad is indeed a replacement.
Replace their oddity with something like a laptop or non iOS environment.
It's a Linux box with WiFi.