In the long run, it frees up the hardware manufacturer to make big changes that benefit the user. For example one of the reasons Apple was able to pull off the

In the long run, it frees up the hardware manufacturer to make big changes that benefit the user. For example one of the reasons Apple was able to pull off the Arm transition was because they didn't have years of backward compatibility to deal with. They didn't have to deal with 32 bit apps, because those had been banned by Apple in a prior OS version. No super old legacy APIs, because they all were already removed in prior OS versions. Just compare the cluster-fuck that Windows on Arm is to the great experience of running x86 apps on an Arm Mac. > Users are then stuck with their favorite apps being broken and unusable. Yes, and they get mad at developers and the developers have to fix it when they otherwise wouldn't have. That means Apple can credibly roll out new APIs and features that are _better_ and force developers to adopt them. That's incredibly positive for users in the long run. Things like HW accelerated machine learning (still not available on Windows!), ARKit (Android equivalent is garbage), GPU accelerated UI (a dumpster fire on Android that no developer uses), etc. Think about this: if you're an AR app developer and Apple suddenly rolls out a new update that massively boosts performance IF you use the new API, are you going to use the new API and spend time porting over your existing functionality? Hell no. But if Apple forces you to, in the long run users get a way faster app, in exchange for some short run inconveniences because the app broke. A famous example that the Android community gripes about is Google's Camera2 API. It gives much better image quality but Snapchat refuses to use it. So Android image quality in Snapchat continues to suck because Google doesn't have the cajones to outright remove old APIs and force app developers onto new ones.