I think part of the reasoning, perhaps misguided, is for quality assurance. It's easier for them to say our stuff runs only on our 'certified' hardware then to

I think part of the reasoning, perhaps misguided, is for quality assurance. It's easier for them to say our stuff runs only on our 'certified' hardware then to try and support everything under the moon. These days I don't think that argument holds up though, back in the early days of x86 hardware and peripherals it made more sense. In a past life we used mac minis sitting on a shelf in a datacenter to run builds off of, it worked well enough.