They’ll make whatever sells subscriptions at this point.
Don’t buy, only subscribe. From media to software and now to hardware and OS. No more license keys you can reuse, no more owning what you pay for, just live services and ever-rising subscription costs that can change at any time for any reason and neuters your ability to take legal action against them while they do it.
Silence critics, control available options, capture profit - that’s the name of the game. They’ll sell this to businesses as ‘take your PC anywhere’ like you couldn’t already do that and then they have a hunk of plastic and silicon they need to pay out the nose for until they finally give it up. And they’ll have to give it up because it literally can’t run anything else on the available hardware. I’m sure folks will hack it apart but like, what’s the point?
This whole circumstance just reminds me of COBOL. Nowadays you have scant few programmers for it, but the ones who do demand a big salary because it’s such old specialized technology and often they have decades of experience in it. There’s simply less COBOL programmers than there were in the languages heyday, and the ones trying to enter that market nowadays have a huge learning curve ahead of them.
The only reason most of these places that do that though, is because they wrote in COBOL to begin with decades ago, and didn’t want to switch away to something more modern as other languages gained functionality and popularity.
I doubt C is ever going to go the way that COBOL has, it’s too ubiquitous, but it does make one consider the language you write in and how compatible it may be not just with what exists today but what’s going to exist years from the creation of that code.