I just gave it as an example. Brain one place hardware in another. It just doesn't require imagination using iOS & iphone-esque RAM/processor on an ipad.
$50 - In the ipad example, I imagine that would be the cost difference for the brain. Maybe a little more, I don't know. But there are definitely decent android tablets in the 100-$200 range. The whole premise of the-phone-is-the brain seems to be that this is all you need on your desktop. Anyway, Apple don't do stuff like this because its cheaper.
But I don't really see a big cost savings. File sharing might be a bit of a win, but small compared to cloud based patchwork stuff (drive, dropbox emailing files). Apps are easy enough to install in iOS anyway and you could make app purchases be cross platform if you are all in the same ecosystem.
Basically, I see the advantage of iOS on the desktop. Its clean and easy and better for a lot of people. But why complicate that by outsourcing processing to a different device? If you want iOS on a laptop, just put iOS on a laptop.
But with a brainless iPad, you don't get the keyboard, mouse and upright display, which was the point...
Anyway, maybe you're right about the cost saving. A SoC is pretty cheap.
A clearer argument is that the guts of desktops/laptops will be replaced by phone guts. This is because an ARM SoC are cheaper than intel, and now good enough. We're already seeing the samsumg chromebook and asus transformer - and as ARMs increase in power, it increasingly makes sense. It's expected that Apple will do one eventually - which I guess also explains the evidence in the article (and you get iOS on the laptop/desktop with no extra work).
Note 1: intel x86 CPUs (apart from atom) are still much more powerful than ARM - even a celeron. But Christensen's idea is that this doesn't matter. He calls it "overshooting" what the market need: people want enough power to do their tasks, they might like more, but not enough to sacrifice other things, or pay more. Maybe it won't run photoshop, but most people don't.
Note 2: Apple has a focus on video and photo editing, and as these apps improve, they will meet the needs of more and more people, perhaps eventually reaching photoshop users. One thing that intrigues me about Apple's choice of pushing GPU (and not CPU) in iPhone/iPad, is that GPUs scale better, and GPGPU might well be the best multicore we're going to get. It's generally perfect for image processing (ie photoshop). So in this case, the iPhone 5S guts may turn out even more powerful than it seems.
$50 - In the ipad example, I imagine that would be the cost difference for the brain. Maybe a little more, I don't know. But there are definitely decent android tablets in the 100-$200 range. The whole premise of the-phone-is-the brain seems to be that this is all you need on your desktop. Anyway, Apple don't do stuff like this because its cheaper.
But I don't really see a big cost savings. File sharing might be a bit of a win, but small compared to cloud based patchwork stuff (drive, dropbox emailing files). Apps are easy enough to install in iOS anyway and you could make app purchases be cross platform if you are all in the same ecosystem.
Basically, I see the advantage of iOS on the desktop. Its clean and easy and better for a lot of people. But why complicate that by outsourcing processing to a different device? If you want iOS on a laptop, just put iOS on a laptop.