This only started with the iPhone. Apple has been around much longer and was a regular computer company before which treated their users like adults.

Imagine for a moment you're an Apple exec who gets to see real usage numbers and revenue numbers per platform and is on board with the current company belief system.

You see MacOS devices completely dwarfed in both users and profit per user by iOS devices.

As that executive, who keep in mind probably doesn't share your opinions on open technology or they would never have got into that position. What decisions would you be making on the direction of their platforms.

I can't help but think we're only going one way and it's not towards something more open.

Exactly. Apple executives threw macOS under the bus in the Epic trial, saying that its capability to run arbitrary software makes it unacceptably insecure (e.g. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/19/22444353/mac-malware-not-...). It shouldn't surprise anyone if a future macOS version requires a paid developer certificate to run unapproved apps or access the Unix layer.

MacOS is indeed unacceptably insecure. Imagine someone downloads FortniteForMac.app (as in, a fake Fortnite for MacOS download since it's not available except on Windows right now) - that can lead to a keylogger and clipboard watcher beaming your data to some foreign data lake, where it'll soon be used to sign into your Bank (proxying requests to your computer to appear less suspicious, of course).

This is exactly how it works since forever on Windows, yet the sky hasn't fallen yet.

The Apple II enabled expansion and the creation of (for the time, amazing) software like VisiCalc. Starting with the original Macintosh, Apple has had a continuous tug-of-war over whether "creative freedom" is better than a "curated experience". iPhone give the "curated experience" side an unprecedented amount of ammunition for their side. Malware apps like Facebook continue to feed that side.

You can see it in the back and forth dance on the Mac. Will Apple ruin it by closing down too much? Time will tell.

Apple has been trying to take control of users ever since the original Macintosh with its attitude of hiding things from them.

DOS came with a debugger that let you modify and create your own software. The Mac didn't.

Planned obsolescence was also not something new --- the infamous Lisa was designed with clock hardware and software that couldn't make it past 1995, for a machine released in 1983. (The PC AT, from 1984, has an RTC that went to at least 2000, and is still a design in use today.)

They have no history of throttling phone hardware to drive sales of new devices. What makes you think they would start doing it now?

There’s a lot of criticize Apple for, but they are among the best in the industry for supporting old mobile phones.

Apple giveth: firmware updates for 5 year old phones

Apple taketh away:

"Apple on Wednesday agreed to pay $113 million to settle consumer fraud lawsuits brought by more than 30 states over allegations that it secretly slowed down old iPhones, a controversy that became known as "batterygate. Apple first denied that it purposely slowed down iPhone batteries, then said it did so to preserve battery life amid widespread reports of iPhones unexpectedly turning off. "

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...

Extending the lives of phones with degraded batteries is a good thing. In fact, the feature still exists today.

The thing they did wrong was not telling people. Now they do.

As stated in the other comment, old batteries often physically couldn't handle the voltages required to run at peak performance, so if iPhone detected these conditions, it would temper those peaks so that the phones would stop randomly turning off for people. The issue was that they didn't tell affected device owners that this was happening, and now they do in Settings.

I had a Mac before the iPhone came out. Apple used to be pretty great.