$130 menu price but regularly goes on sale for $99. Still not cheap (especially compared to the “free” ad platform built in to the TV) but lessens the sting a bit. And much less likely to be abandoned by its manufacturer and get exploited.

There’s no technical reason an iPad can’t run full-blown MacOS or even Linux & Windows; Apple just locks down the hardware to prevent it. I dream of one day having strong enough right-to-repair protections that companies won’t do that anymore and we’ll be able to install whatever we want on the equipment we’ve purchased, but I’m also not holding my breath for it.

It’s not so much that we’re boring, it’s that we’re so far away and not trivial to send mass and energy towards.

I think that a sufficiently advanced civilization that could come over for a visit wouldn’t want to.

I also think a sufficiently advanced civilization with the curiosity and desire to learn about us could do so via probes and we’d never know they visited us.

It’s also likely that an alien species capable of interstellar travel doesn’t want anything we have. Our resources aren’t anything special, they have no need for slave labor and we don’t produce anything of interest to them. It’s a long drive. Why burn the gas and waste the time?