I'm actually right there with you with your development related digs on Apple. They're draconian, and it's only gotten worse in the Tim Cook era. The major beef I've had with them the last decade are the whole slew of absurd (imo) hardware/design decisions and tiny oversights that never would've flown under the old Apple. Losing the headphone port to get a slightly thinner phone nobody was asking for? Shipping those damn butterfly keyboards? Ditching MagSafe power cords for "USB C everywhere" (but not on phones and not all usb C cables are power cables)? Pushing the Touch Bar like it’s the solution to everything when it solves nothing? Da fuq? I could go on. Just one silly thing after the other while I imagine them all patting themselves on the back for a job well done while watching that money pour in. And the prices! Macs were always expensive but damn did this last set of Pro level laptops and desktops get stupid expensive.

It's almost like they put a numbers guy in the CEO role of a formerly design obsessed company and the metric turned from "is this insanely great?" to "will this get us to the _next_ trillion dollars?"

So yeah, as a lifelong Apple user I've had some major beef. There's plenty to complain about. But with that all being said, I’ve been pretty happy experience and productivity wise running an old 2013 MacBook Pro and and a tiny iPhone SE and never considered leaving the Apple ecosystem, because honestly… what’s the alternative? Windows feels like nonsense to me, Google is privacy nightmare, and going full Linux feels like… work. I'm sure it would be possible to carve out a nice system and find some linux gui that doesn't look like complete garbage, tweak my settings just right, and find all the free versions of the apps I need. But at the end of the day I don't think I'd get that "it just works" feeling I still get with Mac OS—for me I'd think it'd feel like a successfully completed science project.

So for me, even at their worst, Apple is still best. And this M1 news and the new iPhone form factors (the 12 mini, specifically) has given me some hope that maybe they haven't completely lost their way.