Absolutely, this is what we eventually did, and I’m immensely grateful for the current ubiquity of low-cost hardware :) it’s just discouraging to me that Apple takes such a hard line on this

In my case, I've got a random 30 eur (~$25?) Chinese netbook over Ali-whatever with Android and 1GB. Totally outdated specs, but with Fdroid (huge repo off libre apps) and Termux (tmux, Perl, clang, lynx...LOTS of CLI libre tools) it makes an amazing machine for the price of two hard-cover books.

EDIT: mocp under Termux works, so is not as limited as I tought.

Apple's tablet/phone branch and social media people want customers and "sharers", not producers.

Their iOS and i-thingy announcement videos pretty much always feature "producers" very heavily, and the features and software they release and maintain often focus on making things. What's the deal with that?