Apple is riding on their earlier successes, and failing to look to the future. Take that "BSD open source tooling". It's a decade old. I depend on that stuff

Apple is riding on their earlier successes, and failing to look to the future. Take that "BSD open source tooling". It's a decade old. I depend on that stuff, and Apple used to market its UNIX roots heavily to people like me. I now see scripts breaking which work fine on Linux and real FreeBSD, because it doesn't support new options added to commands over the course of an entire decade. Or there are behaviour differences, or missing functionality. It's becoming significantly less useful. Enough that I hit these problems frequently and have to find workarounds. I want some commitment from them to actually maintain the system I pay for. The perpetual licensing did solve one of their problems, customers who didn't upgrade, and reduce their support burden. But this coincides very closely with the end of any real maintenance of the core operating system underneath the GUI. Since 10.6 it's been sorely lacking, and the quality drop is noticeable. You're right about the storage pricing. When you spec out a fully loaded Mac Mini, the pricing is obscene. I do need a new Mac to support Mac development for my customers. I need a system as a CI server, and for interactive testing. A Mac mini would be ideal for a small office. The old ones were woeful. The new ones are better on some fronts but terrible on other counts like graphics. And the pricing is insane for what you're getting. I don't need laptop parts in a tiny case. I do need an affordable system which will last a while, rather than an expensive fashion statement. If it was twice or even four times the size, I wouldn't care. I do however care that the storage is expensive and soldered. What if I wear it out in a few months after thrashing it soundly with CI builds and testing. The whole system will be an expensive brick. A single NVMe slot would have solved that. This does drive away developers, particularly ones who develop applications which require higher-end systems, such as scientific computing. Apple doesn't have a high-end system to offer. But I can get or build a PC with a fantastic spec for less than the cost of the Mac mini and run Linux or Windows on it. Microsoft have even started tools like vcpkg which significantly lower the entry barrier and maintenance cost for developing on Windows. It still has a number of disadvantages over Linux or MacOS, but they are actually catering to a real need while Apple stands aloof, ignoring the needs of people who would drive the use of their hardware and software.