I think it depends a lot on your job. I used to do a lot of Cadence Virtuoso work in Windows (now I've moved to Linux) but that fact that is was running on Windows only mattered once, when I setup the tool. From then on I was full screen in the CAD tool and my day to day was basically identical to my flow now. I imagine for a lot of professionals, like myself, it's the application suite that matters, not the OS.
That's not obvious at all. The memory hierarchy is very different in an Apple SOC compared to a typical PC architecture. For example, I don't think there is the equivalent of a system level cache in a PC.
JTAG is very useful to test that this particular iPhone was manufactured correctly, so Apple doesn’t completely disable it. That said, Apple does have a hardware disable that removes the ability to access registers and memory via JTAG. One only has this ability with special development iPhones that have to be obtained illegally, in the US anyway.
Didn’t these just come out? How do you know the other offering have better sound?