These kind of "conspiracy theories" for this or that what amounts to negligible money always make me cringe. Not that companies don't do shitty things for money. But they don't do things like that for negligible money compared to their other operations, especially since there are far more important reasons to do them...
The reason is platform coherence and control, and lock-step updates. To avoid cases like this:
...and not the insignificant money that could be made from devs updating a laptop a little earlier (especially since you can trivially use a still supported 5-6 year old laptop anyway with the newest Apple OS, and you wouldn't see any major performance issue, except in cases like the Intel to ARM switching. So what would they gain? Developers forced not to use an 8 or 10 year old laptop? As if they would?).
The reason is platform coherence and control, and lock-step updates. To avoid cases like this:
https://segmentfault.com/a/1190000040213084/en
https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windo...
...and not the insignificant money that could be made from devs updating a laptop a little earlier (especially since you can trivially use a still supported 5-6 year old laptop anyway with the newest Apple OS, and you wouldn't see any major performance issue, except in cases like the Intel to ARM switching. So what would they gain? Developers forced not to use an 8 or 10 year old laptop? As if they would?).