Exclusives doesn’t mean distribution rights.

Also gaming is coming faster to arm than apple is going to switch back to x86_64. (But still not that fast)

Hard to imagine but back in the day it wasn’t up to your operating system to distribute software. They were just a platform and you had open choice to obtain software.

Apple showcasing what their hardware and software was capable of was normal. I don’t think this was negligent but maybe naive seeing how things are run now. It was much better and we got better products and competition.

Budgie was an apple developer before with Marathon which was exclusive not because of any distribution rights but just preference for the platform.

Alas money talks.

Technically yes. Very much so.

I used to work at FB a a while back (working on infra, not FE or anything user touching) and we would have private development servers and occasionally I would need to do work on the FE PHP repo (called www) and would need to stay a development server for FB.

It would connect ti the various services and database as read only and was a private copy. It functioned just like a real webswver with the exception that the cache was stone cold. It would takes MINUTES to load the front page the first time. It is crazy how much caching just makes it functional.

The problem is that there are so many services and datasets read all the time.