Went from "Here's to the crazy ones" to "we'll punish our customers for not jumping how we say" in 30 years.
They've always banned iMessage access that they determined to be compromised. It's part of security and preventing abuse.
It just probably took a couple weeks for their automated system to detect.
Hopefully affected users can get it working again on their Macs via customer service, if they even care.
I'm going to go wayyyy out on a limb and guess that people who were enthusiastic adopters of Beeper Mini, AND who own a Mac ARE probably going to care about getting their access working again.
I'd actually say the bigger thing would probably be "via Customer Service, if Customer Service even cares, and doesn't tell them to just create a new Apple ID".
It's nice as a second screen if you already use it on your phone. But getting messages only on your computer isn't so useful in our mobile-first world -- at least not for a lot of people.
This is Beeper, a for-profit company, throwing a tantrum, violating the ToS of Apple but leaving Beeper's users and their friends holding the bag.
Just because Beeper is delegating the ToS violation to a bunch of random people doesn't mean they aren't complicit. It appears they are acting in even worse faith than Apple here by suggesting their new mechanism is safe and has no side effects when it actually does.
If the cost for me to enjoy a relatively spam-free and stable iMessage experience is to simply not do dumb things, then I will voluntarily not do dumb things (at least not with an account/machine I care about).
Don't sacrifice your devices for another company's attempt at 15 minutes of fame.