[weblacky]

Without going too far down the rabbit hole I will agree that MacOS should really turn paid again. I too would prefer to be in a longer platform support if they just asked for money occasionally. Now that there's been the architecture switch Intel will be quickly pushed off the board just as fast as PowerPC was pushed off the board.

As a daily driver I still enjoy using the newest macOS software along with brew and GCC and even CLang through Xcode, occasionally. But I understand that for a business workflow I wouldn't trust my Mac simply because there's no directive in Apple to keep old things running, old software compatibility, old API's, and even hardware that can run just fine is retired based on dates or what generation of graphics processor has.

Assuming I was making money with these things and I didn't have anything too specialized I probably would still try to use macOS whenever I could as the basic business administrative platform but I already have some equipment that's Windows only and it's getting more so as I'm assembling a workflow. Then again that's where it's sort of always been, so I don't mind going back as long as there is in fact a path for me.

The inability to run Intel Vs on the newest Apples Macs hit me incredibly hard. I used to treat my laptop and desktop as an all in one machine that could do anything and run everything. It even justified the high cost and personal expense. Now that I can't do that anymore I'm relegating Macs more toward treating them like Chromebooks, that just have enough power to perform administrative and daily tasks well but I don't need awesome power anymore because I can't do anything with them that needs awesome power. I used to run two or three VMWare Fusion VMs at a time, back then I would need that much power. Now a nice spec MacBook Air would do the job, no reason for a MacBook Pro or anything like that, what the heck am I going run that needs that much power? My options became so much more limited. Until Microsoft has a native booting Windows OS for Apple silicon we're in a bad way. It also means that there may be no second life for Apple machines anymore. Once the MacOS support is two out of date you can't run Linux on them and you can't run Windows on them, so they truly become trash even though they still might work fine.