They control the ecosystem in the way that they provide what hardware is new on MacOS and what capabilities it has.
So if any developer wants to support modern devices they have to port to that new hardware. They don’t have any choice, if they want to stay relevant.
I wouldn’t necessarily present that as a good thing. If operating systems become incompatible with old software, that means that such software cannot be effectively preserved and may be lost to time eventually without a committed maintainer.
This is and always will be true about software. Progress sometimes means abandoning bad ideas, even ideas that were good at the time but are bad now that something else has changed.
Old Windows games generally don’t work on modern Windows without a virtual machine.
I don’t see this working. The reason that Apple and ARM work is because Apple controls the whole ecosystem on Macs.
In what sense? The vast majority of macOS software is downloaded/installed from the internet, just like Windows.
I don’t see it working because the Windows APIs are a dozen self-oxidizing dumpster fires scattered into the wind, but that’s a different story.
They control the ecosystem in the way that they provide what hardware is new on MacOS and what capabilities it has. So if any developer wants to support modern devices they have to port to that new hardware. They don’t have any choice, if they want to stay relevant.
I wouldn’t necessarily present that as a good thing. If operating systems become incompatible with old software, that means that such software cannot be effectively preserved and may be lost to time eventually without a committed maintainer.
This is and always will be true about software. Progress sometimes means abandoning bad ideas, even ideas that were good at the time but are bad now that something else has changed.
Old Windows games generally don’t work on modern Windows without a virtual machine.
See, you say that, but it doesn’t seem like Rosetta 2 going anywhere any time soon, which means developers aren’t pressured their software to ARM.