I suspect you're being downvoted because this is an empty, meaningless comment without some elaboration on why you've decided this. As it stands, there's no room for discussion: the only paths forward are for others to simply agree or disagree, or to try their best to guess at what your concerns are in order to further the conversation.

The comment states the why clearly when read within the context of the article: "I'm clearly no longer the target demographic and their corporate goals aren't aligned with mine as a customer any more"

Did we miss a memo where Apple suddenly changed their target demographic and corporate goals?

I don't think they did.

The comment seems like an emotional nostalgic conclusion they have after watching the WWDC, without any mentions why they think future will be worse than what we have now or what we had in the past.

Those things are rarely (publicly) unambiguously stated, so no, we didn't miss the memo because there wasn't one. Does not mean that over the course of time a target demo can change for a company though. Apple would hardly be the only company who did.

Pity though, Snow Leopard was something to be envious of.

Maybe no statement as such, but at the very least the move to non-user-upgradeable hardware feels like such a move.

For me personally, the ability to upgrade RAM and storage, and graphics card on a desktop are central to a professional workflow, and part of my purchasing decision as a prosumer.

Coupled with a million other issues I've had over the past few years, including reliability and support, I no longer feel the added cost of a Mac versus a Linux machine is justifiable.

That statement is still basically meaningless. It’s a conclusion, not reasoning.

> to try their best to guess

Or perhaps ask for clarification.

I mean, I'm still on Yosemite, and I didn't even want to "upgrade" to that (but had to, to use the iPhone 8 I bought). I would rather have stuck with Mavericks. Every new macOS update seems to bring new freedom-limiting changes which I fundamentally disagree with, and it's getting harder and harder to justify using such a closed platform...

Stratechery's mention of what hackers/programmers move to as being an indicator of what's next is interesting, as currently it feels like these types of people are largely moving to more open platforms. I see it all over my social networks where super talented engineers are embracing not only open software, but open hardware, too... We shall see, I guess.

Same here. Still in 10.14. Work machine is already on Linux. Personal one will be soon. Sad to lose some apps (e.g. Dash, Affinity, Alfred, Fantastical, Postbox, 1Password, ...) but in the end it will be more powerful and fast with Linux and i3 as I spend a lot of time inside the terminal and text editors. My 2014 MBP is slowly dying from hardware problems (screen goes blank at random, keyboard wears out, cursor jumps at random from time to time, ...). I am bored. Made a detour with Apple for a few years and it was fun (beautiful and Unix based) but I'm coming back to Linux with a minimal setup. When it comes to servers, I've never left Linux. And last but not least I prefer free software, open source, the mentality around it than closed proprietary stuff. I have a dying iPhone too.

Same here. Currently I'm doing a Linux desktop and a minimal Windows laptop for remote work via SSH. Once I'm convinced I'll never realistically need to run mainstream apps I'll go full Linux.

Same here. Although it will be 10.13 for me, which is the last version with a good subpixel hinting. The best possible font display is of utmost importance to me, and retina+subpixel rendering is optimal for now. I know that it is possible to re-enable it in 10.14, but it works only so-so. And with 10.15 its certainly gone.

I was bothered that they removed 32-bit support, so my desktop is still on Mojave. I suppose I can understand it. With the ARM transition, it certainly makes things simpler.

> I will not be migrating from Mojave to Catalina, and will use my current generation of Macs until they are obsolete, while finally making the transition to Linux

I've recently been doing this, after some time (ahem, a decade) away from "serious" desktop Linux. Some observations/pointers:

- Running ultralight window managers with minimal services still feels the most "right" and predictable/stable way to have a Linux GUI. So that hasn't changed. Unfortunately this means manually screwing around with scaling and size problems on 4K displays now. Like, really weird stuff like various windows being drawn at different scales or part-scaled-part-not and drawing your cursor a different size when you mouseover. It's no fun sorting all that out. Boo.

- Wayland is less horrible than I expected but does give the impression of being a lovely new way for any ordinary application to crash your entire windowing system. As if Linux didn't have enough of those already.

- It's still easier and more predictable to just run the damn thing in a Virtualbox VM under Windows, if you've got the horsepower for it, letting Windows handle the drivers for the actual-real-hardware. This may not be true on stuff like System76 or oldish Lenovo machines or something, but probably is if you've got, say, a dedicated recent-vintage graphics card, unusual USB devices, anything like that. It's just way less crashy in a VM, on the same hardware, unless you're damn lucky and probably running fairly old kit. Was true in 2010. Still is, it seems.

- Gnome3 has gotten so incredibly resource-hungry and unstable that it's finally driven me to KDE (see above about handling scaling issues in the lighter WMs being a PITA for why I'm not in Awesome or XFCE or something), which is a DE I've never liked since I first tried it two decades ago. It is a little better now, admittedly, and doesn't make me feel ashamed or like I'm Doing It Wrong for not running exclusively K* applications like it used to. The settings panels are still some kind of bad joke, organizationally. It's not that there are too many options, it's that they're trollishly organized. Friggin' gnome-shell. What an absolute garbage fire. Which is a shame because aside from being even harder to customize meaningfully than macOS (!) Gnome3 looks fairly pretty. It's seriously, no joke, awful though. I wish I could use it but it's simply broken, at present.

- All the new packaging stuff I've tried sucks. AppImage is closest to being good but it's exactly as good as having a bare exe file on Windows or downloading a static binary on Linux, so... it's fine, but does nothing for you like adding console launch commands ("code ." for example) or configuring your environment, as far as I can tell. None are as good as Homebrew and Homebrew-Cask (yes it's on Linux but there are way fewer eyeballs on it so fewer packages and they're often broken) for managing user-, not system-level packages. Snap's complete crap, like, they should just give up, it seems irredeemable at this point. Flatpack is significantly better but still not great. Usable for some unimportant things if you don't mind them doing weird, broken stuff sometimes or just not working when you need them to (see again: unimportant things)

Incidentally, I've settled (back) on Debian after trying Fedora 32 due to tons of recommendations on Reddit (I... did not enjoy the experience) and already knowing I didn't care for Ubuntu (anymore—it was great in the late 00s) as I'd tried that in VMs a few times during my Linux hiatus and not liked it. I also toyed with Void Linux on a crappy little machine for a while and damn is it nice for low-end hardware. I tried Manjaro but I-forget-what serious thing was broken about it on my rig and was going to be a pain to fix. Great installer, though. 10/10 on that.

Thanks for the great tips! I’m not super thrilled at the idea of running Linux on Windows, though that may be the best option. It would be nice to have more games available, but I find using Windows a grating experience with its constant popups and annoyances. It’s a thousand little things that annoy the heck out of me when using it. I had a Windows work box for 3.5 years and the only nice things I have to say for it we’re Outlook, Excel, and SSMS, which are fine products.

Strongly agreed, I haven't even kinda liked Windows since Win7. Still, it's not as bad as the constant oops-rebooted-there-goes-your-work fest I recall from early Win10. I forget it's there most of the time, until I suspend my work VM and fire up Steam for some games.

I don't really trust a ZFS root on Linux not to, you know, suddenly break in ways that keep it from booting up, so absent that the snapshotting you can do for your whole OS when it's running in a VM is very handy, too. Though of course you could do that with any OS playing host—Windows is just convenient as the best driver shim available on generic x86 hardware, really. Takes a bunch of the headaches out. "I want to upgrade this, will my Linux installation become way less stable if I do?"—who cares, it sees what VBox shows it.

I'd be interested in Linux were it not for the fact that I also want to be commercial applications, which are a major Linux blindspot.

I wonder if Windows has matured as a developer-friendly environment since I left with all of the WSL stuff that's been happening.

To me, the first indications that Apple was no longer interested in software professionals were: 1) Removal of USB-A ports, 2) Removal of the ESC key. I bailed out of the Mac world right then. The subsequent software issues (dropping of 32-bit, instability in Catalina, this new MacOS 11) just confirmed my suspicions. The Linux Desktop is still frustrating in so many ways compared to the MacOS, but I can be reasonably productive.