I disagree. For a lot of the personal computing era, the problems with OSes and hardware were mostly a matter of technical progress. The problem with iPadOS is totally different; it's a problem that was basically manufactured in and of itself, and completely artificial at that. I do not think this is a good problem to have at all.

I don’t think you’re representing the state of iPad accurately.

In iPadOS 26, more extensive multi-window multitasking like Mac was added.

The quantity of windows you can keep open at once depends on your iPad’s SoC.

If you have a newer Pro iPad with more memory you can keep more of them open and slow down happens further down the rabbit hole.

The hardware is being pushed and used.

As another example, the iPad has pretty intensive legitimate professional content creation apps now (Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, and others).

So there are people out there pushing the hardware, although I’ll join those who will say that it’s not for me specifically.

I don't suggest the problem is that the hardware can't be "pushed and used", the problem is that the hardware is being artificially limited by Apple for some unknowable reason. (Well, the reason is knowable, but I'm sure some would dispute it anyways. It's very clearly an extreme defense of their 30% cut on all software that runs on iOS devices.) This is not a question, it doesn't matter what people are doing with iPads, it really is happening. A good example, the first iPad with hardware virtualization support in its CPU could initially run VMs provided you had a jailbreak, but then Apple entirely removed the virtualization framework from the following iPadOS update.

There is no particular reason a general purpose computer should be "not for me specifically" in terms of what you can do in software. In terms of design, sure. But not in terms of what you can do in software.

(I have a suspicion the same reason is responsible for why you basically don't find open source software on iOS devices the way you would on even Android or Windows; it doesn't make any money to take a cut out of.)

I suppose, that's an interesting way of framing it - yet in my gut I feel like I am paying for something that I am locked away from.

Sometimes though Youtube will make the iPad uncomfortably hot and consume the battery at an insane pace.

So, I guess there's someone using the performance.

>> I own an M4 iPad Pro and can't figure out what to do with even a fraction of the horsepower, given iPadOS's limitations.

> It's a nice problem to have, since for most of computing history it's been the other way around. (Meaning the hardware was the constraint, not the OS.)

For anyone who works with (full-size) image or video processing, the hardware is still the constraint... Things like high-ISO noise reduction are a 20-second process for a single image.

I would be happy to have a laptop that was 10x as fast as my MacBook Pro.

I've been RAM limited more than CPU limited for some time. In my personal workflows, 32GB was not enough and I'd receive out of memory errors. I bumped that up to 64GB and the memory errors went away. This was in a Hackintosh so RAM upgrades were possible. I've never tried an M* series chip to see how it would behave with the same workflow with the lower RAM available in affordable machines.