They can’t get rid of a general purpose OS. They have to have products that allow you to write software for the iDevices, and web applications, in general. You need macOS for these things.
Not really. They can set up cloud boxes for that (with pre-installed libraries and simulators) and let Microsoft, HP, Dell etc serve their beloved developers with crappy low-margin hardware.
All the development goes to the cloud nowadays. The local machine will soon become irrelevant.
I have never needed to access the shell on my iPhone. But to do dev work I obviously need it on my Mac. But if you look at the rise of Docker and other such things, running stuff on the core OS is not always very optimal. It would be just as good to have a virtualized machine in whatever OS I want and be able to take that around with me. When I can have that, I don’t really care how locked down they make the OS as long as I can stay productive.
