As a science fiction enthusiast, I love seeing new technology go mainstream. I’m the kind of person to whom Steve Jobs was speaking when he said the iPad was “magical.” For me, it really was, and often still is. The most magical thing about the iPad to me is that when I find myself wondering, “Hmm, did they really make this work the way I’d expect it to?” the answer is more often than not, “Of course they did.”

I believe this is why Apple has been so successful at bringing new devices to mainstream consumer markets: they are very, very careful to make things work the way we expect them to. Even when it’s challenging: more challenging than other companies are willing to accept. This gives Apple products–and the Apple brand–a keen, sharp edge that can slice through the toughest customer’s resistance and make us want their stuff. It feels as if these tools were made just for us, and perhaps no one else. And even the most inexperienced people realize that they, too, can use these devices, because they just work!

But there’s another edge to that sword. It puts some pretty strict limits on the kinds of products that Apple can give us. In order to maintain the illusion that Apple products magically work just how we expect them to, we have to have expectations in the first place. And those expectations need to be the same for most potential buyers.

As illustrated so beautifully in the movie Now You See Me, the secret to much of what we call “magic” is finding a clever way to know, in advance, what the right answer (or behavior) has to be. Apple’s magical design relies on their engineers knowing exactly how we expect new or complicated things to work, ideally before we even think about it. So there’s the limit to Apple’s mystical powers: if we don’t know what to expect, Apple can’t deliver products that magically work that way.

For me, this has become most obvious in the area of “2-in-1” laptop/tablets. I’ve been playing around with Linux lately, and I wanted to try it on some of the latest non-Apple (i.e., less “premium”) hardware. As I began researching the modern laptop market, I was surprised by how many 2-in-1 laptop/tablets (laptops with touch screens and disappearing keyboards) are now available. Apple has famously resisted entering this field, keeping iPads and laptops completely separate in their product lines. But Microsoft (with Windows), Google (with Android and Chrome), and the old PC manufacturers (Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, etc.), have provided plenty of 2-in-1 models. And they work!

I chose a Dell Inspiron 13″ 7000-series 2-in-1 for my experiments, and I planned to immediately wipe the pre-installed Windows software and replace it with Linux.

What astonished me was how smoothly Windows 10 worked with the 2-in-1 hardware. Right out of the box, it switched automatically from desktop to tablet (“touch-friendly”) mode when I swung the screen around to the tablet position. Like an iPad, it automatically detected how I was holding the “tablet” and flipped the screen around to keep “up” up, even switching from landscape to portrait mode. My first question was, “Why have I never seen this on a Mac?” If Apple is so innovative, why haven’t they ever given me this shiny, magical product?

As I played around with Windows on the 2-in-1, and as I eventually replaced it with Linux (Ubuntu 15.10 with Unity interface, because Fedora 23 with Cinnamon surprisingly didn’t yet fully support the latest Intel Skylake video hardware), the reasons for Apple’s inability to deliver a decent 2-in-1 laptop/tablet became clear to me. It’s because we don’t yet know how they are supposed to work.

Although the touch screen seems to work flawlessly from a mechanical perspective (it works just like a trackpad), Linux doesn’t have support for 2-in-1 laptop/tablets in its interfaces. For example, Ubuntu’s Unity is one of the more aggressive interfaces with regard to touch-friendliness. (Ubuntu is aggressively working on Unity 8, the main feature being a unified desktop+tablet+phone interface. But Unity 8 is far from ready for mainstream use. Maybe by April, 2016, but I’d be surprised if they make that goal.) No one in the Linux developer community seems to know how a unified interface should work. It’s awfully hard to develop something when you don’t know what it’s supposed to be!

Windows 10 does have 2-in-1 functionality, but it’s obvious that neither Microsoft nor its customers know how it’s supposed to work. The two critical pieces of the adaptive interface–adjusting the screen orientation when the user rotates the device, and switching to “touch-friendly” mode when the user folds the keyboard away–are both subject to user-configurable settings. The user must decide if these actions should (or should not) be handled automatically. There’s even an option for having the system ask the user every time whether the switch should be made or not. This is 100% unacceptable to Apple’s “magical” products. Quite simply, it can’t “do what we expect” because we don’t know what to expect. The expectation hasn’t been set. Perhaps this feature is too new. Or perhaps, there may be no “right” way to handle the situation, because we simply aren’t expecting a 2-in-1 product in the first place. Maybe, like the ability to transform a rabbit into a rhinoceros, we don’t feel the need for laptops to turn into tablets or vice-versa.

Even if Microsoft or Ubuntu do successfully establish a common expectation for how this should work, there’s another big problem, and I suspect this is the one that’s really holding Apple back. The user interface scaling for laptops and tablets is significantly different. I have no problem dragging windows around by their title bars with my finger. In fact, it feels magical! But grabbing a corner of the same window to resize it is nearly impossible. Pulling down a menu and selecting a command is tricky, and I often mess it up and spend more time trying to “touch” my way through a menu than I could have using a mouse or trackpad. And clicking laptop-sized buttons with a finger is hard even with a trackpad, much less a finger on the screen. We typically hold tablets closer than laptops, so we expect them to be scaled differently. It doesn’t feel at all natural, much less magical.

One could argue that changing to “touch-friendly mode” should include changing the user interface scale and style: redraw the window framing, turn buttons into “flat” switches, or at least make them finger-sized. Change the font scaling or screen resolution. But I’d be willing to bet that Apple has tried all of that in their super-secret design labs and found problems with those solutions as well. (Maybe it makes people nauseous, or it’s too hard for application developers to cope with the transitions elegantly.)

Windows 10 (and perhaps Unity 8) are able to give us 2-in-1 laptop/tablet interfaces only because those interfaces don’t work quite right. They aren’t magical, and in some cases they just don’t seem to work at all. This is fine for someone like me, who’s all-too-familiar with half-baked technology. (Lord knows, I’ve built plenty of it myself.) But for a mass consumer market that has no tolerance for things that don’t work as expected, there’s no place for this stuff. Apple laptops and tablets are still the most popular devices in their categories. And those categories still exist, despite the arrival of 2-in-1s from other brands. If the 2-in-1s worked, we surely wouldn’t see laptops around anymore, much less thriving, as Apple’s clearly are.

So why can’t Apple customers have shiny things? Perhaps it’s because we haven’t properly imagined them, yet.