You can call it incidental if you want, but it generally takes some effort to ensure everything works. That's especially true when you consider how much has changed since optical drives were common.
As for other forms of disk images, such as software distribution, those are still a common thing in macOS.
I would agree with the idea that they're not bothered about breaking workflows, particularly those involving command line tools, but hardware compatibility isn't nearly as bad as the internet might have one think. Source compatibility isn't all that bad either, many ancient Objective-C/AppKit codebases can be made to compile in an evening. It's mainly binaries that break.
Usually all it takes to keep one's software running on macOS is compiling against the latest SDK once every ~5 years. Depending on the nature of the app, source changes often aren't even required. As a dev I don't think that's too much to ask.
Things change but this is hardly some sort of sudden rug pull by Apple.
That's an enormous concession, relative to Windows or Linux.
Windows yes, but Linux... no, at least if it's open source.
Closed source apps that compile fully static, these tend to be stable and Just Run in my experience... but open source apps? Good luck trying to bring these to even compile 10 years afterwards without going through an insane dance with Docker...
> I can still use my 12 year old MacBook Air. It’s not super current and not all apps work, but it’s actually still a decent Apple experience.
You might be able to do that in Windows, if you bypass TPM and CPU requirements or if you stay with Windows 10 extended updates.
You won't be able to in macOS without OpenCore Legacy Patcher and a lot of faith in your God of choice.
The Linux situation reminds me of unix back in the 90s even across distributions.
who cares?
when a closed source app fails the door is shut for good on self-remediation, unless you want to reverse engineer/break the law.
when an open source app fails to compile you can choose to put the time in to get the thing working. it's not a shut door, it's just a long path.
The problem is that most software people use for work is going to be closed source because the vendor wants to make money on these juicy business contracts.
Linux makes a point of being very difficult to be used with closed source stuff, in kernel and userland alike (getting static compilation to work is an utter PITA), and that is a reason why commercial software written for Linux is rare, and that in turn is the dominant reason why Linux adoption on the workstation has been very slow for a very long time - until a lot of business applications shifted to the browser, making the client OS platform all but irrelevant.
No.
Can't run current versions of any apps including Chrome, Edge, and Safari.
Meanwhile the hardware is perfectly fine and could run a supported version of Windows or Linux.
Call me when Apple has a "LTSC" version of their OS. (Spoiler: they won't, ever. Supporting Apple in an enterprise is nothing short of a nightmare.)
It's even possible to build Mac apps to run on everything from OS X 10.4 (2005) through macOS 27 (2026) across PowerPC, Intel, and Apple Silicon in a single binary. See XLD[0], which does exactly that.