That’s funny! This illustrates why a Constitutional Representative Republic is better than a “pure” democracy. 
. Which reminds me of a statement by a Harvard business professor. This is a close paraphrase from memory: “consensus is desirable, cooperation is necessary” referring to leadership and decision making.
I think I’d vote for an iPhone/Mac version of this.
Somehow this is triggering Monty Python for me.
“Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”
I would buy the heck out of this thing.
Every time I look at that image I see something new.
Phones that you can extend by adding an external display and keyboard are an idea that seems to come up every few years, and never gets traction. I suspect it’s because these days everything is in the cloud for most people, so what’s the point?
That said, the iPad is becoming that kind of mobile device.
Way back in the day of the old Motorola Droid line (spanning the 3.0 “Honeycomb” transition) I had a phone that docked to a separate laptop-type device with a 15" screen. The device was like $300, and plugging your phone into it yielded basically an Android laptop. It was pretty cool.
I’d love something like that for my iPhone - or alternatively, just let my stupid iPad take phone calls. All the hardware is there.
I think the difference with the ThinkPhone is that Windows is running remotely. It’s like a combination phone/thin client. I’ve said it before but I think eventually most people won’t be using powerful portable devices. Most of the promise of AI takes a lot more horsepower than we have in our desktops so I don’t expect to do very much on my phone.
If your iPad has cellular you can get VOIP phone service.
It’s missing a belt holster! 
Apple sling bag in leather, when???
I first seen this years ago, when Tim Cook was quite new and I’m sure the iPhone 5 / 5S was out and they went to a two model strategy… with the 5C. It sounded like that, along with going for a bigger screen was going to dilute Apple down into everything SJ got rid of when he returned. Now, we have a bunch of confusing models on the iPad / iPhone line and budget options :-/
That’s makes upselling easier. The base model doesn’t have quite enough storage or some other feature. You upgrade it a bit, but now your base model is almost the same price as the next more expensive model. So you decide to get that one, but it doesn’t have . . .
Upselling is a classic technique for getting the customer to spend more money than they originally planned to spend. Why struggle with your 5GB of free iCloud storage (you got with an $800 or $1800 iPhone) when you can upgrade for only 99 cents a month?
I’ve been wanting that for years. Someday, someday, I hope to only have one computing device that adapts to whatever different context I’m working in at the time.
I was listening to The Talk Show the other day and Gruber and Snell were talking about how macOS could run as a VM inside of iPadOS. My thought on that is that the VM is unnecessary overhead. What we’d need to have a Mac in an iPhone or iPad form-factor is for the OS to recognize what context the device is being used in (by what peripherals are attached), and display the appropriate user interface. The discussions about adapting the iPhone OS to desktop size or macOS to touch are missing the point.
The comic is hilarious and I take its point, but Apple does act like a democracy to some extent: When they introduced the iPhone, they pared down the feature set of a smartphone into an absolutely minimal set and then tried to deliver as close to perfection on those features as they could. In the following years they have added features, sometimes when those things became technically feasible, but also somes when it became clear that people really did want them.
Apple is a democracy of sorts, just. a very slow, very selective, and sometimes very grudging one
The ladder pricing model, I hate it as much as the next guy
I’m aware of this - but that’s not what I need. I need legit phone calls. VOIP is too unreliable when I’m not on Wi-Fi, even though I live in a major metropolitan area. There is, for example, one notable overpass on the interstate as it runs through town that seems to be a complete dead zone for cellular data.
All the hardware to support it, as far as I’m aware, is already inside the iPad. The iPad even has a phone number. It’s just not allowed to make or receive phone calls.
I’ve been hearing very good things recently about Samsung DeX which is basically this. You just plug your S23 Ultra or Z Fold into a dock and it switches to a desktop experience. It seems at least on par to Chrome OS from what I’ve seen. It would be cool to plug a USB-C iPhone into a dock and automatically get the iPadOS Stage Manager experience.
From my view, here in Apple’s walled garden, it appears to be more of a benevolent dictatorship: “A government in which an authoritarian leader exercises absolute political power over the state, but is perceived to do so with regard for benefit of the population as a whole.”
Maybe that feature is being reserved for the Apple Folding iPad Ultra Pro Max. 
I’ve told this story before, so apologies if this is a repeat - but my first tablet was a Samsung Tab 7. And there in the store, to activate it, it literally made a phone call. Not a VOIP call, a literal, honest-to-God phone call. And then once it was activated, that functionality disappeared permanently.
It just frustrates me. I’d totally carry an iPad Mini instead of my iPhone 11 - and buy the most expensive, fancy, tricked-out one, along with paying an extra “makes phone calls” hardware fee if they wanted one.
That’s probably a better metaphor They do seem to respond to market pressure ever so slightly from time to time.