The apparent neglect of developers with respect to some of the changes (and non-changes) in the laptop and desktop lines seems to be giving many developers pause and concern.
Apple has a passionate, loyal developer community. Developers who create iOS apps use OS X machines to do it. They spend almost twice as much on an OS X machine (vs. a Windows machine) to get over the barrier to entry.
Apple has never made anywhere close to the same investment in their developers that their developers have made in Apple. Their mindset can be summarized as (I think):
1. iOS and OS X are "easy to develop on" (so Apple thinks) so WWDC is sufficient as far as developer relations. Lately even WWDC is an empty shell.
2. Huge software failures don't seem to touch Apple's revenue stream (e.g. Maps, iCloud, security exploits), which over time makes Apple more and more deaf to the realities of software outside their company.
3. Apple execs are "courageous" and visionary. The company has a very top-down culture.
As someone whose Windows dev experience goes back to Windows 3.0, I was thrilled with WinRT, having Visual C++ finally catching up with C++ Builder and .NET finally going properly native as it should have been since .NET 1.0.
Hopefully things will be more stable now.
Microsoft wasn't thinking much about web developers during their monopoly of Internet Explorer. Or, well, they might've had thoughts. But no love.
Now, you could do dev work on something cheaper just like you could do dev work on raspberrypi but no one asked for that.
Yes, Ballmer said that but with Nadella, Microsoft seems to have focused once again on developers as a main influencer and buying segment. Although it's probably fair to say that Microsoft has courted the dev community for quite a while with things like ActiveX, VBA, FrontPage (eek! lol) and other technologies built-in to their products.
You're also probably quite accurate that devs loved Apple maybe even more than Apple loved devs. The UNIX underbelly of OSX was great for many developers and the build quality of their hardware and software. But with their purposeful neglect of Applescript and even browser engine choice on iOS, there are many small razor cuts that Apple seems to be ignoring.
I still like the company and some of their products but the perception from the business press, developer community and maybe even users of mistakes in hardware and software are taking some of the shine off. And for a company seen as a standard-bearer in tech, that should be cause for concern for Apple execs.
Apple offering an extremely obsolete Mac Pro filters down from a brand standpoint, it hurts them by turning former ambassadors against them (such as myself), and by losing third party support for professional software when the customer base starts asking for alternatives because the hardware is too obsolete.
They're losing 2 things:
1. Exclusivity of really good hardware and software. They're still among the best in hardware, but a nice 'ultrabook' (like a Surface Book, XPS 13, or X1 Carbon) running Windows 10 is comparable to a Mac in ways that an Inspiron 6400 running Windows XP or Vista just wasn't comparable to a 2007 Macbook Pro running OS X 10.5.
2. The dedication of the high end. The developers on this site are a tiny market, for certain. But we're the people our families and friends go to for computer questions (for better or for worse). The artists and especially the musicians and videographers which the Mac Pro used to attract are more trendsetters. If enough high schoolers watch their favorite Youtubers editing on their Mac Pros, and ask their uncle to look up from reading HN on his Macbook Pro to recommend a laptop, that effect can have a powerful impact on the low end.
I honestly highly doubt that. As I indicated in my post, there's very little new instructions / capabilities in Haswell and newer cores outside TDP reductions for a general purpose OS. There's a couple new AVX instructions and some crypto instructions, but outside that, I can't think of much (admittedly I'm no expert though) that macOS would need that would warrant cutting support.