> But why should it change?
Because I'm not buying Macbooks anymore. In fact, over the past 5 years I've increasingly seen people develop on a dedicated Linux box or Linux VM. Apple's appeal is shrinking to developers, and it has been on a steady decline for the past 10 years. For all of MacOS' POSIX certification, it hasn't stopped people from trying to implement Linux just so they can run privacy-respecting software and benign GPU libraries that Apple refuses to officially support.
Their plan here isn't working. It might placate the 80% of users who don't care about this stuff, but the technical sentiment towards Apple's technologies is waning. I'm frustrated with WebKit, I'm frustrated with Swift, and everyone is frustrated with their 30% tax. Something has to give, and it's probably going to be Apple's facade of benevolence.
> It definitely has the largest pile of money, but that's still a very unfitting description for that, at least in my opinion.
All businesses are constrained by a set of limiting factors. The most important factor will always be capital, since you can trade it for any one of the lesser factors. Apple uses their 200 billion USD cash reserve to buy goodwill in the form of advertising, first-in-line tickets to TSMC and the finest lobbyists in the nation. They have every protection that lesser companies do not, which is why their valuation supersedes any other publicly or privately traded organization.
I'll stop calling them the biggest company when business stops revolving around money.