And does this have any actual impact on either the OS itself or its users?

It saddens me to think of all the CPU cycles spent on hosting online discussions that mention the fact that MacOS officially licenses the UNIX brand.

unix registry silently removed from relevance.

linux compatibility is way more relevant now.

Solaris as well, apparently

They used to marketing Mac OS X around Unix, but not anymore.

This is inevitable, there is no escaping it.

This doesn't mean anything. The official Unix registry is completely irrelevant to the modern world. Nobody uses OSX pretending it's compatible with Solaris. Like Microsoft, Apple only cared about this certification because it used to be a checkbox on certain government procurement tenders.

When you're small, you need the certificates and badges others give you to be seen and be validated. I really don't think anyone needs to become familiar with Apple or macOS and that any of these certificates now matter a tiny amount to a multi trillion dollar corporation.

Given the amount and volume of software that mac has, the fact that almost all new interesting stuff are released for mac first or even mac alone, I also don't think it needs to attach itself to bigger names for platforms.

I think the financial burden of Ubuntu Mobile, Unity 8, and Mir; and the immediate rise of docker and WSL made canonical fully shift to server, so much so that their website no longer is about a better os for people, but what can it do for your cloud. Other distros also followed its path and Linus became all in on servers and IoT. I see windows as the biggest pile of trash in the world. Infinitely inconsistent, buggy, patched worked, visionless and rotting. Honestly that is one piece of software that is worse that AI slop.

And so what is there for Apple to compete with honestly? Haiku? Solaris?

How is SCO still a thing?

It now looks like a museum of obsolete operating systems.