That is precisely why I mentioned Microsoft. They have historically gone through great lengths to keep devs happy.
That’s what happens when you focus on developers instead of users. How much smaller would Windows be if they didn’t have all of these backwards compstible hacks? Hell, they had a half dozen different ways to define a string that you actively had to convert back and forth between just to call various APIs and that was back in the early 2000s. I’m sure it’s gotten worse since then.
You don’t have to make developers happy. Developers will go to where the users are. Where is all of the development energy these days? It’s definitely not on Windows. What makes developers “happy” are paying customers.
Microsoft has been trying and failing for years to produce a viable ARM laptops. Partially because of an insistence on backwards compatibility and all of the code bloat that entails. Apple transitioned the Mac platform four times since 1984 and created four successful ARM based platforms in the last decade.
But as far as the Surface. MS only made $1.329 billion on Surface devices. That’s less than a third of what Apple makes on Macs. Heck that’s less than Apple makes on Watches and AirPods.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/10/apple-results-64b-in-reve...
https://www.techradar.com/news/microsofts-surface-sales-keep...