It's not about running arbitrary code, though; it's that you're specifically trying to use the exact thing that the cheaper edition has removed from it to create market segmentation.
In the case of Windows Home, that's components like Hyper-V. (Imagine taking Windows Home and injecting Hyper-V from a pirated copy of Windows Pro.)
In the case of iPadOS, that's all the components that macOS has that iPadOS doesn't.
The way to "add" those components to iPadOS is different, but the effect would still be the same: having a computer that works like it has the better edition installed, without paying for the better edition.
But it is. Microsoft just doesn't want home users to run Hyper-V, without paying for a (slightly) more expensive Windows Pro license. Home users still can download free VirtualBox or whatever other solution they care to use. They can also upgrade to a Pro license in-place, by paying $100.
This is all perfectly normal.
iPadOS is completely different. Apple does not _allow_ users to run any non-trivial system-level code. If Apple doesn't want you to access virtualization on iPad, you're out of luck. There are no easy workarounds.
No, I mean, "not allowing you to run arbitrary code" is just a side-effect, not the design choice. The design choice is market segmentation.
In the Windows case, they can enforce your inability to install/enable Hyper-V on Windows Home through simple measures like protecting system files from modification.
But in the iPadOS case, the only way to really prevent you from running a macOS VM, is by preventing you from running any VM.
Due to the Turing-completeness of virtual machines, there's really no lesser measure they can take. You literally cannot create a piece of software that can run arbitrary VMs except for if the VM is semantically macOS. Whatever signal you would look for to blacklist macOS, an adversarial VM creator can mask by modifying the installation. (At an equilibrium point of such a game, the "adversarially-created macOS VM" would end up looking more like a Hackintosh rootfs than like a Mac rootfs — but it'd still look and feel and work like macOS, and that's all users would care about.)
>iPhones don't segment anything, yet they are locked tight.
Of course they do. There's market segmentation between iPhone tiers, between just using the iPhone as a computer (connecting it to a monitor and running macOS on it), differentiating iOS from the much less tightly maintained Android ecosystem (for which "walled garden" is a feature felt as "less hassle, less malware, more secure, mostly just works"), and several other things.
Their stranglehold on app distribution is absolutely a design choice, and it's done to continue harvesting a 30% tax of as much as they can get away with.
Which is the "better edition": $2000 iPad Pro or $2000 Macbook?
If the goal is to maximize hardware device proliferation, third (and Nth) variants could be created with software-locked differentiation. Why stop at 2 hardware editions?
> Which is the "better edition": $2000 iPad Pro or $2000 Macbook?
The one of the two with a lower profit margin for the manufacturer would usually be the one considered to have more "value" in it.
The usual way to measure this, when software editions are locked to particular hardware, is by looking at the cheapest hardware they sell that'll have the given edition of the software installed.
(Another example of this: managed vs unmanaged routers.)
> Why stop at 2 hardware editions?
You're limited by the willingness of your developer ecosystem to develop different versions of the same third-party software for all your different OSes. Nobody wants a device with no third-party app support.
(But that being said, there is actually a third, even-less-capable hardware ecosystem Apple sells, with its own ecosystem of mostly fungible apps: Apple TV!)
> You're limited by the willingness of your developer ecosystem to develop different versions of the same third-party software for all your different OSes. Nobody wants a device with no third-party app support.
If Apple made an iPad Ultra with Linux terminal/framebuffer long-running background VMs, alongside interactive iPadOS apps, it would sell like hotcakes.
We'll have to wait for Nuvia devices to show the benefits of this use case, before Apple claims credit for a new iPad Pro customer segment.
> Another example of this: managed vs unmanaged routers
Do you mean something like Amazon eero vs generic OpenWRT routers? Eero has a few different hardware editions, usually segmented by WiFi speed. They also have a monthly subscription for additional software features. Presumably they make most of their revenue from subscriptions, with a small margin on the router hardware.
No, I mean like companies like Linksys that have product lines with model names that all just look like "N-port network switch, [un]managed" for different prices, that are only differentiated by the number of ports and what firmware is installed on them.
In these product lines, not only do the managed switches cost more than their unmanaged equivalents, but you also only get the option for a managed switch after a certain number of ports.
