I’m going to offer a view, call it Apple biased or whatever, but here goes.
I’ve been working with Apple in my various roles for most of my career. One through line is that more so than any other computer manufacturer, they believe in highly defined “use cases” and or defined roles and user types for all of their products.
Periodically, it bubbles up as to why Apple doesn’t bring features X or Y to platforms B and C in addition the established platform A.
Prior to the M1 iPads, the most recent possible crossover that we and our customers were most interested in was if Apple would bring Pencil Support to the then newly released iPhone Pro Max.
Many of our customers and a lot of the tech press saw the Max as reaching the size barrier that they think was keeping Apple from bringing it to the platform. In fact some of our “apple experts” were certain that it was “imminent” .
Of course, that has yet to happen.
Almost the same thing happened with the release of the M1 Pros. Those same “experts” as well as of a lot of the tech press were certain that it was imminent and one of the Apple blogs even went as far as to say. it was “just a matter of weeks”. And you also saw something similar when the magic keyboards were released with a built in trackpad.
Going all the way back to the days of the Apple II and then IIGS which coexisted with the Mac, Apple has been consistent in the message that they see each product line as separate and distinct, and the focus by Apple is on bringing the best features and functionality to each. And relatively recently a focus on interoperability “where it makes sense.”
TLDR, sadly especially for those of us here on the “one device to rule them all”, quest, we are never going to see an iPad running MacOS or for that matter, a touchscreen MacBook Pro because either represents too many compromises to the core functionality of those devices.
IMHO one notable exception is what they did with the iPhone versus iPod. But I also think that’s the exception that proves the rule.
EDIT: PS I am on a four week streak for at least one “tome” post every week 