Agreed. Neither a higher tier of hardware within a given product line nor newer, better-performing hardware are really supposed to change anything fundamental about the software—the type of work that’s done on them nor the way in which the work is done—rather, it’s just meant to allow a bigger scope of the same tasks and workflows. The same OS and mostly the same apps, but bigger potential for projects. E.g. a current 12” MacBook or an 2010 Mac desktop can run Photoshop and Final Cut, but if you’re working with huge 80 layer images and editing a feature movie in 4K, you’ll probably want to use something newer and probably from the pro line. Everything is the same, just... more/bigger.
Of course, all software has minimum hardware requirements, so some intensive programs for macOS haven’t been feasible to bring to iPads/iOS until now (eg. photoshop), and some still aren’t feasible (eg. maya).
Also I’m not sure what specific examples people are thinking of when they say they want apps that push the hardware. I believe there are games that push the hardware, and I know Procreate has limitations on size of canvas and number of layers based on hardware resources. Other creation apps probably have similar limitations. So in a lot of cases, I think it’s really up to the user to push the limits of the hardware. I don’t think the Word application itself pushes Macs, nor would a full-featured version push the iPad Pro. It would take the user creating a humongous document to push the hardware.
I do think many apps could stand to be more robust—but not only for iPad Pros, and not because the current hardware finally allows it. I think for a lot of apps (eg. Office suite) the lack of full functionality was never so much due to weak hardware, but rather due to lack of financial motivation for developers, or perhaps an over-simplified understanding on their part of what an ipad might be used for.
But I understand why people are frustrated with iOS. I think it comes from the fact that iPads specialize on a different set of tasks from Macs, though there is a lot of overlap. The overlap is tantalizing and makes one wish there was even more overlap. But while iOS is a relatively new OS and has been going through more relatively dramatic changes than macOS, at its core, iOS is built to be light, simple, energy efficient, and secure—while macOS has more of an emphasis on scope and versatility. They are opposite ends of a spectrum and generally at odds with each other, so I think that’s why Apple has been slow and reluctant to bring certain macos functions to iOS. But over the years, Apple has brought some macOS-type “complexity” to iOS (multitasking, the share sheet, the files app, the dock... anything else?), so we’ll see where Apple eventually settles iOS. But again, I don’t think the features were added because hardware improvements finally allowed, except maybe multitasking, but mostly due to Apple slowly evolving iOS to what they envision it to be (with the vision also perhaps evolving).
Hoping cintiq functionality (extended mac display with pencil input) comes in MacOS 10.15/iOS 13 as rumored!
