> Will people actually put up with this kind of treatment?

Dramatic much? Some services were offline for a few weeks and that inconvenienced some developers. Nobody's getting beaten or abused. Life will go on. The extreme horror and PTSD that some may feel over a service disruption will fade in time, like tears in rain.

As long as Apple owns the best platform in terms of potential profitability for developers, yes.

You mean the one where people can't be sure that their app will even be published once they finish developing it?

That's the one! It's a feature (for the users) not a bug.

iOS 7 is requiring lots of work from app developers, to both fix what ios 7 broke in their app and to make their UIs fit in with the new design language apple is pushing. (To be fair, there are new APIs some apps are benefiting from).

Developers response to the need to do a lot of work for no gain? "This is a great opportunity!"

Anyway, it comes down to who has the power in the relationship. Though both parties are obviously necessary, the devs need Apple more than Apple needs the devs. Add to that the fact that the biggest devs are making tons of money, what's the point in rocking the boat?

I've been rewriting my code through Apple System 6->System 7->System 8/9->Carbon->OS X->PPC to Intel->iOS. Honestly most of my memories dealing with Apple have been deprecation and rewrites.

Every time Apple touts some new technology, I think to myself that they'll be sunsetting it in 5 years or whatever. I'm coming to terms with nearly the entirety of the code I wrote the last 24 years being useless. I highly recommend to anyone getting started in software development to only use open source and cross platform tools.

My own theory for why most software projects can only reach a million lines of code is that this is the limit of entropy. Think of it as, what's the largest boat that you can safely bail out with a bucket of water?

Your apps will be quite a bit smaller on Mac OS than say, Windows or Linux, or else you'll find yourself keeping up with changes more than making stuff. And I don't believe deprecation is a necessary evil to innovate or pivot. Apple could and should do much better in this department.

This is my current frustration.

I have a Macbook from 2008. It can't run the newer OS X. I was looking into doing a little iOS development this weekend. Turns out, newer Xcode requires newer OS X. I could upgrade to, I think, Lion. But I'd still have to upgrade to Snow Leopard first. And with Mavericks coming out and obsoleting Mountain Lion, I'd get what... a few months use maybe?

On top of this, I can't even run the latest iTunes to sync with my iPhone 5. My perfectly fine Macbook is about as useful as a doorstop right now. I mean, a Core2Duo with 2GB of RAM is outdated. No one will dispute that. But these aren't the days of Pentium vs 486 or 386. It's pretty silly and arbitrary.