my tinfoil hat theory is that they make small features depend on new hardware.

for example, let's say the new os depends on m5's exclusive thumbnail generator accelerator, and let's say it improves speed by a 20%.

now, your M1 notebook than on previous OSes uses standard gpu acceleration for thumbnails will not have this specialized hardware acceleration, it will have software fallback that will be 90% slower.

you won't notice it a first thought because it's stuff, fast, but it eats a bit of the processor.

multiply this by 1000 features and you have a slow machine.

I don't know how else to explain how an ipad pro cannot even scroll a menu without stuttering, it's insane how fast these things were on release

yes pretty much this. make useless features use up resources and make basic scrolling slow.

the Liquid Glass for example probably is not so great when it comes to resources. Probably works better with latest metal and hardware blocks on the GPU in M5 as opposed to using GPU cores and unified memory on 8gb M1 making latest macOS work not so great. I have the M1 8gb air and it is really slow on Tahoe. It was snappy just a couple of years ago on a fresh install.

It's not tinfoil, that's just how publicly traded companies work - increasing the share value