I'm on the same pre-paid plan since 2005 or so.
and it’s dystopian. imagine you are watching youtube on this thing and when an ad shows up, you can’t look away, even if you try to they can track your eye movement and just move the window, you can’t mute it, you certainly cannot install adblock on it, you are forced to watch the ad until it satisfies apple or you just give up and take out the headset.
I don't see any difference to an iPhone there. If they wanted to, they could already track whether you're looking at the ad (using the camera) or whether you muted it. You can turn off an iPhone, you can take off a Vision Pro. Apple hasn't exactly been known for intrusive ads either.
First off, I don’t think depression is a good measure of intelligence.
Exactly. Which is why we shouldn't judge an AIs intelligence based on whether it can develop depression. Sure, it's feasible it could develop it through some other mechanism. But there's no reason to assume it would, in absence of the factors that cause depressions in humans.
Writing on random pieces of paper. Sometimes I also write an email to myself or use notepad.
I have the base model for my iOS builds (my main development PC is a Windows machine). It works fine for that purpose. The SSD space runs out immediately though, so I had my company buy an external drive. Also wouldn't want to do any prolonged development sessions on it personally, just owing to the small screen, keyboard, lack of ports etc. That could be fixed with external screens and adapters though.