The point of giving the OS away was to encourage buying a new device. Especially when it sends you notifications/badges that the new OS is available - and then the new OS takes advantage of newer hardware features ... and for older hardware makes sure to let you know that your Mac/iOS device doesn't support this feature.
The margins on selling the OS were never very good. Apple has always made the majority of their money from hardware sales.
I'd argue the point of giving the OS away for free was nothing to do with buying new devices. It was probably to make sure people upgraded sooner, rather than being put off by having to buy the new version. Better for the whole ecosystem.
Well put. Its just like iOS--developers are happier if most people are running the latest version. Less version-fragmentation. The "less adopted" variants of Windows are a problem for development and testing. It might make sense to only support/test XP, 7, and 10--but what a mess that is.
Just last month, there was an win32k update for which the Win8.0 version failed to install on machines that was in-place upgraded. Only the Win8.0 (aka NT 6.2) version had the problem.
> and for older hardware makes sure to let you know that your Mac/iOS device doesn't support this feature.
Where is this case? In my experience, something I saw online simply wasn't available to me, like AirDrop, for instance. I upgraded my mid-09 MBP to 10.7, looked for AirDrop and couldn't find it.
Same for Handoff and the Bluetooth-required new features in Yosemite. Apple doesn't go out of its way to inform me my hardware is out of date; features talked about in the media are just missing.
edit: Also, your post sounds dangerously close to the uninformed "Apple purposefully makes iOS n perform worse on device x", as if that's a smart business move.
Re Handoff in Yosemite... there are hacked kexts that make it work just fine in older (non BT LE/4) Macs (with regular BT) making it fairly clear that an artificial limitation was introduced.
That's not quite the whole truth. There are two Mac models where you can simply enable it: the mid-2011 Mac mini, and the mid-2011 MBA. Every other model it could potentially work on, you literally need to upgrade the wireless card.
Given that, it makes me wonder how the unmodified Mac mini and MBA perform.
pretty sure the margins for the hardware is significantly higher than the margin for their OS, so it's much more valuable that Apple makes it as easy as possible for people to buy into their ecosystem.
