This reminds me of Web hosting and the review industry around it 20 years back and I worked for a large web hosting provider.
The founder was really open about it. And back then hosting had ~$100 CPA and we had instances where we wouldn't turn a profit on a customer who purchased a shared hosting account UNLESS they renewed after 2 years given the cost to acquire.
To this day, when I see lists reviewing services providers, I'm always skeptical of them and steer away from letting them influence my decision on a service provider.
I've found it's the complete opposite. Traditional corporate jobs aren't in the least bit safe for me and my lifestyle. As a freelancer, I have immense flexibility over when I work, where I work, how I work, and to certain extent, with whom I work.
If on a particular day my family or my personal goals win out on the hierarchy of priorities, not a big deal. Sure, if over time my overall quality of work suffers, a client is going to notice, and that's not great. But otherwise…I'm calling the shots, and to me that freedom is worth its weight in gold.
It's the difference between servant and subserviant.
The fact that your occupation is to perform tasks for clients does not mean you're not your own boss.
The relationship between you and the customers of your company of one employee is (or should be) really not that different from the relationship between you and the customers of your company of 2000 employees.
There is a relationship, and it is in your interest to care about what they want, but that doesn't make them your boss.
Them being your boss in your mind is something you choose to give them if you're not careful, not something they actually own.
They will happily let you think that they have a right to own your soul because they paid you a few dollars, but the simple counter to that is, do you get to own their sould because you paid them a few hours of work?
I think the arguments is non-developers don't really need access to it.
You aren't configuring anything or doing anything that needs access to the file system.
You are simply interacting with documents and online systems/applications that you can do the same as on a laptop. Add the greater mobility and the iPad pro really is a better device for most people.
However, as another commenter mentioned, these individuals who SHOULD really benefit from using an iPad primarily also are the group that struggle greatly with the changes to their overall workflow (see Who Moved My Cheese).
Thats kind of a poor argument that just self fulfils itself. If we mask things like the filesystem and the actual shell, then of course no one will really need to use it. If we unmask these things, maybe paradigms will shift and they will themselves use these things.
IMO so few people know how to code because we have been abstracting it for years, not because its tough to do or anything like that. Plenty of things people do are just as challenging as coding. You just need exposure to coding is all, its easy to write bash or python. Anyone could do it in a week. Hard to get that exposure when a company decides it won't be possible for you, and its a slap in the face considering these features are there in the device but you have to jailbreak the damn thing and violate your warranty to get at them.
If you are not the most technologically inclined person, its really the company's marketing that is choosing the product rather than you. Its true with any product you lack relevant knowledge in, marketing becomes the dominant factor of choice beyond tooling that you don't fully yet understand. I think what is especially frustrating in this case, is that these capabilities are already there built into the device, they are just not exposed unless you jailbreak the device.
People who say this have never worked in an enterprise, global software company. Or if they did, they may not be working on key projects.
Just SCALE ALONE is enough to expand a group of engineers a significant amount. A personal project is fine to run 1 AWS or Digital Ocean instance to run the application, database. But global distribution that has to support tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even million+ users concurrently globally? It's a big orchestration of applications and services that requires much larger teams.
Add in payment services and managing those integrations. Then, given that you're a global company and have to operate in multiple countries you have all sorts of regulatory compliance requirements. Who oversees that? Who manages all of these requirements? Not a single dev or a small team.
That's just not how VCs work. Basically it's you HAVE to always show hockey stick growth.
Steady 5-10% per year isn't good enough. It has to grow exponentially. So that's why you keep hiring and keep spreading out the service into a whole bunch of other areas.
1 tripod camera and him wearing one that gets a top down view of what he is doing.