"Bad" and "un-performant" are relative terms and as your company gets bigger, you're increasingly more and more likely to have colleagues who write even worse queries than an ORM would.
For example I've encountered queries that are not only slow, but they generate several hundred megabytes of output all of which is sent to the user's web browser where JavaScript selects the relevant two kilobytes of data to show the user.
The worst I've ever seen was a system where every single write to the database would be sent to every single web browser viewing certain webpages. 99.999999% of the writes were completely irrelevant and javascript in the browser would simply disregard them. The server load was immense... and eventually our Sysadmin brought it to someone's attention. Where we found out it was leaking sensitive data.
> Connect via USB to a PC as a mass storage device
... if you want a mass storage device... buy a mass storage device?
Personally I'm happier with the cloud though. I want all my files in the cloud anyway as an offsite backup, and the internet is generally fast enough that I can access the remote copy whenever I need it.
> Be switched on immediately when plugged in, after the battery runs out
My battery never runs out though.
But seriously iPhone CPUs are pretty power hungry with 3.46Ghz with six cores and aside from just booting up there's also some pretty high decryption going on to decrypt and verify the operating system hasn't been tampered with. I'm pretty sure a USB cable can't provide enough watts.
> Want to use a keyboard/mouse/monitor to control your phone instead of your thumbs
USB and Bluetooth keyboards totally work with iPhones, and iPads. I use a mouse and keyboard all day long every day with my iPad (I'm happy with my thumbs for my phone, but I could use the keyboard for that too).
And you can absolutely connect it to an external screen too, with HDMI or over a network connection.
I pretty much never use it on my Mac, all the apps I use show the filesystem in a sidebar and have a fuzzy search feature. Even Apple apps (like Xcode) have that so clearly they're aware of how bad the file picker is.
The gateways I use don't, or at least give me the option not to.
Those iFrames cause all kinds of headaches when the user hits the back button or double clicks a submit button or does any number of other things that happen thousands of times a day on a moderately high traffic site, and when it messes up you either miss out on a sale (ouch) or charge the customer twice (double ouch).
> hope it's a better [model] than the freemium model we've been relying on for the last few years.
It may be a better model for something, but it's impossible for this to be used on a "reddit-like" site.
Reddit is a large community where many users are anonymous. A paid model means it will never be a large community and posters will never be anonymous.
And while reddit has tried to make freemium work, I'm pretty sure it has never worked and their real business model is ad based. Advertisements are a centuries old model that has proven to work well, I encourage you to switch to that (and on your API, make it a requirement to show ads).
Also don't allow people to remove the ads by paying - you need to show ads to people with enough money to buy the stuff you're advertising. Exclusively showings ads to poor people does not work. Just make sure your ads aren't annoying.
It's your site, you can do what you want with it, but it won't be like reddit with your proposed business model.
For example I've encountered queries that are not only slow, but they generate several hundred megabytes of output all of which is sent to the user's web browser where JavaScript selects the relevant two kilobytes of data to show the user.
The worst I've ever seen was a system where every single write to the database would be sent to every single web browser viewing certain webpages. 99.999999% of the writes were completely irrelevant and javascript in the browser would simply disregard them. The server load was immense... and eventually our Sysadmin brought it to someone's attention. Where we found out it was leaking sensitive data.