And on top of which, these are definitely noisy nuisances, and as a result people are gonna fuck with them, and it's inevitable that eventually it's gonna hurt someone, which'll cause a huge backlash and expensive lawsuits, etc etc etc.
The only situation i can see these being even potentially viable is in very rural areas, where delivery routes are expensive, people have lots of open land for it to safely reach the ground, and there aren't a lot of nearby neighbors to annoy
You're putting the cart before the horse. Tell us the specific situational problem that you're trying to solve. Like what ultimate end result are you trying to achieve.
That way we can help you achieve what you're actually trying to achieve
From a financial standpoint i would never bet against them, but personally i haven't liked the direction they've gone since Jobs died. But I'm obviously in the minority, because they've sold gabillions under Cook, including brand new product categories like the watch, airpods, and apple music. IMO none of those are particularly special, but whether it's Apple's marketing machine or something i dunno, but the fact is those are all new product categories and they've all sold very well.
It doesn't have to have software that runs in both. All it needs is a toggle to switch between ipad os mode, and mac os mode. That's literally all it needs. In ipad mode it's just ipad os. In mac mode its just mac os. Mac mode would require a hardware keyboard and pointer device, not touch screen.
It would be super useful.
When you want to draw something you go to tablet mode and use the pencil. - When the drawing you made needs some editing that iPad software can't do then you switch to mac os mode and finalize the drawing.
Do some programming in mac mode because programming on ipad is extremely limited. - Then when you're done coding you switch to tablet mode and relax with some touch based jigsaw puzzle games.
When you have to use the windows-only programs that work mandates you have to use then you go to mac mode with attached keyboard and run it through parallels. - Then that evening you switch to tablet mode and chill in bed reading a comic book.
Etc etc etc.
All the things that are better done on a mac, and all the things that are better done on an iPad, they all have no reason for existing on separate hardware
It's amazing how very far ahead siri was at the beginning, and how extremely far behind it became. It's a massive miss for Tim Cook's Apple
Very interesting to know, but i just looked it up and it still seems expensive in the long run. Azure's cheapest storage tier is 1 dollar per TB per month. So 5 TB of backup would cost 60 bucks a year, but a 5 TB drive costs about 120 bucks. So after 2 years of cloud backup it costs you an extra 60 bucks a year every year vs. if you just bought a hard drive.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/#pricing
Seagate have always worked perfectly for me (knock on wood). And to avoid counterfeits i only buy hard drives from a physical store of a large retailer chain. You'll pay a little bit more, but really only a very little more, and you'll know that what you're buying is an authentic drive that came directly from the manufacturer
"best" depends on the particulars of your situation. Cloud backup is one of the easiest but over time can be expensive. In the long run buying a second same-sized drive is cheaper than online backup, but it requires more money up front, and having the original and backup in the same physical location doesn't protect against local disasters like a waterpipe bursting flood. There are specialized tape drives for backups, which are cheap per mb and so you can make lots of separate backups which makes your data safer, but they're very slow to read and write. And there's other option too, like optical disks, raid arrays, etc.
Best i can really say is to do some online research to figure out what's right for your particular case.
Don't forget to back up to other additional drives!
Consolidating all your data into one drive is very convenient, but if you aren't backing it all up then it's only a matter of time until you lose everything. If you're gonna have a bunch of small drives hanging out you can use them as a backup. You could even set them up into a RAID, but I've never actually done that so i can't vouch for it