Re: My thoughts on this ... @badger31
I've never been a fan of Apple, but Apple's refusal to "converge" iOS and MacOS/OSX is one thing I've cited as something they did right.
Yes, from a sales basis, they'd rather you buy an iPad and a Mac, but that's also better from a technical standpoint. While it's tempting to look at a tablet and see what looks like a laptop screen (if it only had a keyboard attached), the truth is a lot more complicated.
Simply attaching a keyboard to an iPad does not, of course, make it a Mac. Macs run x86 software, and they do it on hardware far more powerful than even Apple's best-in-class ARM hardware. Macs have more memory, more GPU processing power, and far more secondary storage (HDD/SSD) than iPads.
In order to make a convertible iPad into a credible Mac when the keyboard is snapped on, it would need to be able to run x86 Mac programs at a usable speed. Given that ARM processors are marvels of low power consumption, but not so much at raw processing speed, an emulated solution is unlikely to make happy customers. The ARM CPU itself natively isn't even fast enough to be a credible Mac, let alone trying to do it with the large overhead of emulation.
That means that to deliver the same quality of experience you'd get in a native Mac laptop, you'd have to have a secondary x86 CPU for Mac mode within the base (keyboard). You'd have to do the same for storage (Mac programs take up a lot more room than iOS apps), with a separate SSD in the base unit. It would need its own RAM and a separate GPU (separate from the ARM one, not necessarily separate from the x86 cpu).
By the time you've gotten done adding all that stuff, you've essentially got two separate devices. The only shared bit would be the display itself. When you're carrying that laptop around, the weight of two of everything is always there, and so was the cost at the time of purchase. It would cost about as much as a separate iPad and Mac, because it essentially is.
MacOS and iOS can't really be converged without a serious design change. MacOS has poor touch support (if any), from what I've read, and iOS is so locked down that it's not credible as a real computer. Apple has shown itself to be very inflexible in making the iPad (and iPhone) any more friendly to "real computer" features like being able to see the file system. They can't be converged without major philosophical changes.
You could add a keyboard to an iPad... people already do this. If that's all you need, then further convergence is of no use. If that's not all you need, though, then you need a real computer... one without the many limitations of the mobile platform. You're better off getting a separate laptop and tablet (and/or phone) rather than trying to meld the devices together to save yourself one LCD screen. That way, you can have a PC processor in your PC (term used in the generic sense, not to mean Windows device), with a PC operating system running on it, using PC programs with a PC level of storage available on board. When you need more mobility, you've got your tablet, with everything similarly tailored to that platform.
You don't need to be running one device as a PC and a tablet to get them to work well together. They can seamlessly sync via "the cloud", and both of the devices can have their own related (but still separate) software to use the synced data. It seems "gee whiz" cool to be able to run exactly the same app on tablet/phone and PC, but what use is it? PCs are far more powerful, have way more screen space, and have better input devices (mouse and keyboard blow touchscreen away ergonomically). Why use apps that are designed for relatively limited mobile devices on a PC when you can do so much better?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
