If Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility on their platform, why should Valve or other developers be burdened with the added cost, especially on a platform with small market share that won't drive many sales?

Yeah and they all got big and wealthy by exploiting laws, loopholes, state subsidies and even slave labor back in their days. Let's not pretend the German industrialists from 100 years ago who started those businesses were some patron saints and beacons of legality and morality.

I was working for a big German scrap metal business a while back and during the Christmas party the CEO got so drunk he started bitching how much better it was in the past when he could engage in corruption and tax fraud to grow the business without being caught compared to today when this isn't possible anymore.

None of those companies you listed could have gotten remotely as wealthy in the legal and regulatory environment of today.

That's the problem with European way of thinking. Entrepreneurs and start-up founders taking on huge workloads and risk to start a business and create jobs, are automatically demonized as "rich freeloaders exploiting the system", to support this ideologically driven class warfare in hopes of getting more votes, where the ruling elite take 9 pieces of the economical pie, give half of the remaining piece to the middle class, the other half to the lower class and tell them "hey look, those business freeloaders are the reason you only half a piece".

If you want to create new jobs in new emergent industries, which is always gonna be a high risk high reward situation with plenty of failures, you'll have to support the ones taking the risks somehow instead of demonizing them as freeloaders. That's how the EU economy is now only half that of the US, when 20 years ago they were on par.

So then in Europe we end up in the situation where most of the new ventures are coming from entrenched industry players and hereditary wealth with connections to politics who actually exploit the system, instead of ambitious working class people taking a chance at building something like in the US. Basically neo-feudalism.

When sleep deprived, the brain enters REM sleep even while awake. That's what those hallucinations are.

In the era pre-ChatGPT they had a USP which it made it stand out, but today it's a different landscape.

The concept of "Miele lasts forever" is as outdated as the "German cars last forever". It used to be true in the past but we can't be coasting on that trope today.

It literally can't work at all. When was the last time you went and bought an Airbus? Airbus doesn't make consumer products. Passengers are the consumers flying inside them but they're not the ones buying them, it's the airlines who only have a monopoly of 2 global players to choose from in a highly regulated industry with expensive moats to enter meaning Airbus and Boeing don't really need to compete cut-throat.

Governments excel at building large infrastructure and defense companies like Airbus, Boeing, what have you, not at building consumer products at scale like Google, Apple, etc sine their success is dictated by the consumer spending preferences, not by requirements a government makes up.

Communist regimes did not make the best consumer products, the free market did.

So like in the US?