This congress is owned. This completely stifles field readiness.
In their corruption, they are un-American.

macOS 26 has more technical debt than iOS. Let's hope, cool heads prevail.

I guess, I will stay on my current version forever.

The pettiness is catching from our fearful, felonious fascist king.

Appears fixed in the current beta.

This is the standard operating procedure for our monopolizing giants. Merge and cut staff to keep obedience high via the fear factor.

Then, produce less at inflated prices and jack up the top-level bonuses and stock.

chatGPT is a linguistic engine. The way it and its competitors work is it finds the best match FOR THE NEXT WORD in a sentence based on deep data of a vast sea (morass?) of human output. There is NO understanding of the underlying meaning. It is all just probability. There is no intelligence. The "emergent intelligence" is OUR interpretation of the output - eg the meaning we give it.
People are impressed by it the way they are impressed by the current output of our politicians. All form, no substance.

The techniques for blood ox SPO2 measurements have been known for decades and are low-tech.
Non-compete agreements are illegal here.

Hiring the best in the field for any subject area is smart business. I do not see anything illegal or odious here. You hire the best for excellent execution.

Same for previous patent disputes on ECG.

You don't fix that by slapping on a new label. You fix the programming.

Well, I have a MacBook Pro i9 6 core and an M1. All I care about is what I experience using it.
The M1 kills the i9 in general use for Development and Productivity. Performance is noticeably faster. Even games run faster as does Windows 10 ARM64 Preview under Parallels Preview.
The battery life of the M1 is to die for.
I will never go back. And I doubt Apple will, either.

I agree, it is sad that things are changing in this regard, but the world has changed. It is more hostile, and almost every avenue for customization is also a path for malware and viruses. And most users are not savvy, and become victim of external attacks.
Unfortunately, no matter what the root cause, the vendor ends up getting the blame.

However, it would be nice if there was a switch that could be thrown, perhaps as part of the XCode install...

My dictionary definers 'manners' as 'polite or well-bred social behavior. It is learned to improve social integration. It is also based on individual decision making. The value is that I make a choice, my manners imply a respect for others.
Not uncharacteristically, the Microsoft solution presumes to remove that freedom of choice, and thus limiting individual freedom. It also undermines the true meaning and value of conscious manners, without choice there is no conscious respect.
This is not unlike an Orwellian society, which removes moral choice by simply making it impossible to make the wrong choice to begin with; means may include continuous surveillance and the removal of all potential implements of violence such as pocket knives and toiletry liquids more than 3 oz in volume...