This is not a coincidence, Apple purposefully make it painful to use anything with any of their products unless it’s one of their products

Yea … no, sorry to say but this one’s on Microsoft. I get it, hurr durr Apple expensive and elitist, but they know where to put up their walled garden and where not to. For example they used to have their own video container .mov but they’re way past forcing something like that onto iPhone users. And even back then, the actual codec they committed themselves to in those days was H.264, a standard that’s open to adoption by anybody. You can easily turn an old .mov into an .mp4 or .mkv without needing to alter the actual content of the file and that content is playable by pretty much every media device built in the last 15+ years.

HEIC isn’t Apple’s thing it’s from the MPEGroup, also easily licensable by anybody. I guess the reason why it wasn’t part of Windows 10 from the beginning is because they both came out in mid 2015. Windows 10 seems to have adopted it for viewing (and later editing) in 2018 but they make you hit a stupid download button in their store to get it so that’s lame.

Yep. Lack of format support is usually to blame on the one who doesn’t support the format. You can absolutely blame Apple for this too though, their apps can’t open e.g. Matroska video or FLAC.

And perplexingly, they don’t support uploading HEIC, their own image format of choice, on the web iCloud Photos. So there’s that too.

(At this point my music library is stored as ALAC because it’s well supported in both Linux and Apple’s OSes. Really wish it wouldn’t have to be that way though. Someone needs to tell them about ffmpeg.)

Apple made ALAC as an alternative to FLAC due to the dubious licensing around FLAC at the time.