macOS has been running on A series chips since the beginning of the transition to Apple Silicon. The original developer Macs had an "A12Z" CPU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Transition_Kit

There isn't any good technical reason why an iPad couldn't run macOS. The differences between the A and M series chips is mostly about the kinds of IO the SOC provides. The iPads already use M series chips anyway.

IIRC, iOS was forked from macOS (well... OSX), and they share a lot of internals. I think they could probably start up finder alongside springboard with some tweaking... but they'd much rather sell you an iPad AND a Mac!

Yep this is the biggest news. We’re one step closer to a DeX like experience for iPhone. If Apple did that they would stomp the entire Windows laptop AND desktop market.

The phone in my hand is powerful enough to handle all the general purpose computing I already do, so let me do it Apple!

There have also been iPads running on M series chips for years now.

The actual hardware system differences between an M4 iPad Air and M4 MacBook Air are pretty slim as far as the OS would be concerned.

You can connect an iPad to an external display, keyboard, and mouse. It even has multi-window support.

Not supporting Mac apps on iPad OS is a product decision by Apple, not a hardware or underlying OS issue.

It's been able to run on A series chips for a while. I don't think that's what's preventing MacOS on iPad. It's that the OS is not optimized for touch in any way. Too many small things to click. It's just not the kind of half-baked experience Apple would put their name behind. Likely the same reason why you haven't seen a touchscreen on a Mac.

Pretty sure this is a marketing limitation more than a technical one.

It's a shame it isn't the A19 series with MIE.