IMHO, Mac OS X contributed decisively towards making Apple cool, which was followed by lots of boutique apps and the success of iOS. Loosing that critical mass of developers, even if it's a tiny userbase, would worry me if I was a top leader of Apple.
Apple has had a contemptuous attitude towards developers since.. the App Store? when the iPhone was out? The last two decades? They don't seem to care about this.
App Store was a big improvement for developers when it was new, relative to the alternatives.
The things it does may not seem important today, but back then even just my bandwidth costs were a significant percentage of my shareware revenue.
ObjC with manual reference counting wasn't much fun either; while we can blame Apple for choosing ObjC in the first place, they definitely improved things.
This is a ret-con. If you - as a user - were philosophically and inherently against the App Store, then it may seem that way, I guess?
The reality is that there was a long period of time where Apple built up lots of goodwill with a developer ecosystem that exceeded by many orders of magnitude the pre-iPhone OS X indie Mac developer scene.
There were many, many developers that hadn’t even touched a Mac before the iPhone came out, and were happy with Apple, and now are certainly not.
Another way to see it is that people who programmed for Mac OS already had reasons to be annoyed by Apple (e.g. 64bit Carbon). The iPhone let it get new people, who eventually found out why the pre-iPhone scene felt that way.
I disagree - if the Vision Pro had some strong use-cases then developers would hold their nose and make apps for it. The platforms that get apps are the ones where businesses see value in delivering for them. Of course businesses prefer it when making apps is easier (read: cheaper) but this is not a primary driver.
I think the potential high-return use-cases for VR and AR are (1) games, (2) telepresence robot control, (3) smart assistants that label (a) people and (b) stuff in front of you.
Unfortunately:
1) AVP is about 10x too pricy for games.
2) It's not clear if it can beat even the cheapest headsets for anything important for telepresence (higher resolution isn't always important, but can be sometimes).
Irregardless, you need the associated telepresence robot, and despite the obvious name, the closest Apple gets to iRobot is if someone bought a vaccum cleaner because Apple doesn't even have the trademark.
3) (a) is creepy, and modern AI assistants are the SOTA for (b) and yet still only "neat" rather than actually achieving the AR vision since at least Microsoft's Hololens, and because AI assistants are free apps on your phone, they can't justify a €4k headset — someone would need a fantastic proprieraty AI breakthrough to justify it.
