Yes Apple is about platform control and monetization, and they're pretty good at it. They want you to buy-in into their ecosystem and stay loyal; even developer

Yes Apple is about platform control and monetization, and they're pretty good at it. They want you to buy-in into their ecosystem and stay loyal; even developers of iOS and Mac OS apps have to open Apple dev accounts (and the process of rolling out an app on the App Store is ... byzantine). They keep off copycat and privacy-invading apps that way, and their customers love that aspect of their platform (I even use a cheap iPhone to get away from the mass surveillance devices called Android phones). Apple's Silicon is a great success AFAICT, when Intel has just stagnated for years now. I love Apple innovations like that, and I think Apple Silicon is in principal orthogonal to the lock-in aspect so far, apart from the fact that there won't be alternative O/S on Apple Silicon due to lack of drivers; now of course, Apple could soon extend the ARM ISA in proprietary ways. However, as much as Apple produces shiny consumer laptops (despite their naming, I don't consider MBPs as "professional" devices due to lack of options), I'm probably staying away from Mac OS, because professionally I need to run (mostly) F/OSS apps such as compilers, databases, middlewares, VMs/containers, and backend tool chains. I also believe their notarization thing will kill F/OSS on Mac OS which makes it useless for me. And Apple has to take the piss here, as F/OSS is what Mac OS (Mac OS X) is built on, and what made it even remotely acceptable in 2002/3. If you're a developer of non-Mac OS, non-iOS apps, expect Mac OS to stop being an option even more so than it is already.