Brake Fix
My trusty '09 MBP is still trucking away, though not used nearly as much these days after getting a Frame.Work machine last fall.
There's a '12 Mini laying around somewhere that I keep meaning to press back into service, though am not sure exactly what I'd have it do.
What have these two Fruity devices in common?
User repairability and upgrades; keeping the OS out of my way when I tell it to; and the fact that I haven't purchased an Apple product in over ten years.
The MBP has had most of its innards replaced over time. But, being a Core 2 Duo with "only" 8 gigs of ram, I was really only using it as a bigger screen than what the tablet has when on the road and needing to dial into the shop to fix something.
While the Frame.Work device is great, haven't quite gotten around to loading OpenCore in a VM on it yet, so it's either Fedora or 'Doze.
The main desktop, though, is running OpenCore and Monterrey; those OC folks are amazing. Back when Catalina got loaded (still Clover then) I had to give up on my now-aging - though very powerful for its time - Titan XP, switching to a Titan Black with, at 6GB ram, only half what the XP had. (For reasons left to another comment, I prefer nVidia.)
And don't even get me started on locking root out of the file system. Sure, for a vast percentage of users that's probably a good safety feature, but just whose machine is it, anyway? I (purport to) know how to operate the thing, and understand the risks when running as boss. When I say "sudo mv" to something whose target is in /System, it had better damn well work.
Or, what if I *like* still having bash as my main shell, and don't feel like running sed on the first line of all scripts to change from /bin/bash to a recently compiled /usr/bin/bash?
I shouldn't have to create a snapshot & bless it just to keep things usable.
Overall what they've done to BSD is great, but this overwhelming need to control the entire experience, and keep folks from working on their own machines, is antithetical to the spirit of the company J&W started.
Sure, eventually, they'll have moved away from Intel hardware, but by then one of two things will have happened:
They'll go back to letting folks mod their own machines. Memory and storage, that's all I'm asking.
They'll stop putting a gag over the fingers of folks who actually know how to operate the device.
Alternatively, folks will figure out how to hack their OS with 3rd-party M* chips, just as they have with Intel.
Personally, am not holding my breath. I like OSX, I really do, but don't use any of their native apps. It's just a pretty screen. No Maps or FaceTime or any of that, more iTerm & Vim/VS Code/Pulsar (when it matures a bit). It's just a tool, and it's *my* tool. The manufacturer should not obstruct my either repairing or operating it.
(The overall tenor of this also explains why I've never purchased one of their phones.)
Hopefully, eventually Adobe will create a 'nix version of their own rental software, so I don't have to learn Gimp/Inkscape/Scribus/Audacity/etc., and thus also don't have to consider going back to 'doze as my daily driver.
As to the sliding sales, sure, all this is part of it - I can't be the only one tired of their shenanigans - but part of it is also surely a simple case of glut. Eventually we'll just run out of folks that either need - or can comfortably afford - the latest shiny bling, especially as it's really no shinier than that other bling they just got a little while ago.