Giving up software freedom for "ease of use" seemed like a fine deal at first but then Apple started making decisions that don't quite align with what neither users not developers want. Apple has already started taking advantage of their position as the gatekeeper of the platform.
Microsoft had private APIs and data structures too and it didn't stop developers from using them. However, their approach to that was different: they maintained bug compatibility with old software in order to keep stuff working. This is one of the main reasons why Windows remained relevant for so long.
The fact is Apple simply doesn't care about backwards compatibility. It's not just private APIs, public ones are also at risk:
https://lists.apple.com/archives/cocoa-dev/2019/Oct/msg00004...
It's not a new attitude either. Apple has always been like this:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
> A lot of developers and engineers don’t agree with this way of working. If the application did something bad, or relied on some undocumented behavior, they think, it should just break when the OS gets upgraded.
> The developers of the Macintosh OS at Apple have always been in this camp. It’s why so few applications from the early days of the Macintosh still work.
> For example, a lot of developers used to try to make their Macintosh applications run faster by copying pointers out of the jump table and calling them directly instead of using the interrupt feature of the processor like they were supposed to.
> Even though somewhere in Inside Macintosh, Apple’s official Bible of Macintosh programming, there was a tech note saying “you can’t do this,” they did it, and it worked, and their programs ran faster... until the next version of the OS came out and they didn’t run at all.
Apple is proving you wrong.
Some of the private APIs being used have been stable for generations and are clear improvements in one way or another over the publicly available APIs (like CAContext stuff). I mean a modern OS is not like a library you stick up on NPM and hope no one tries to use internal methods that you'll end up having to support. There are so many desperate teams working on OSX and the applications from Apple that use these APIs, it's not like backwards compatibility, documentation, and most of the issues public APIs face aren't already an issue that has to be tackled.
Apple uses these APIs to make features no one can fairly compete with, which is detrimental to you, as a user, and to external developers. Imagine if any app could use APIs like the ones that Apple Music uses to have tight integration with Siri, or that Apple Maps uses to show on your lockscreen.
When push comes to shove, Apple can tell those teams to rewrite their code. It can't do that to the authors of, say, Firefox.
[0] https://blog.dripstat.com/removal-of-sun-misc-unsafe-a-disas...
This is hilarious, Apple breaks apps that only use public APIs on virtually every release they do, minor releases, security patches, you name it. Apple CONSTANTLY BREAKS THINGS.
People don't prefer MacOS because they are idiots who need "ease of use". There just is no other system developed with something approaching taste. Windows is for those people that put plastic covers over their furniture, ruining in the process of trying to protect it. Linux is for servers.
