I notice Microsoft regularly breaks its own developer URLs as well... even the links from within Visual Studio's help system to their online content. It's sad that the most reliable way to find documentation is through Google.

It’s not like this is even exclusive to the documentation—every new release of OS X takes over /macosx (or whatever it is).

It seems like somebody involved feels that there’s no use for the past.

Yeah, I've seen this several times. I don't know how they put the site together, but it doesn't sound like it would be a hard problem to solve.

As weird as it is on the web, it's even weirder in their developer tools. I kid you not, there are HTML files in "/Developer/Documentation/DocSets/com.apple.ADC_Reference_Library.CoreReference.docset/Contents/Resources/Documents/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/Classes/NSApplication_Class". Whereas, if they'd hired me to do it, I would have probably called it "/Developer/Documentation/Cocoa".

In my more paranoid moments I think Apple is actively trying to make it difficult to develop for their products. I know how crazy it sounds but it's not entirely irrational.

I mean, how can a company that puts so much effort into perfectionism do something like this by mistake?

You can Search for anything in the Developer Documentation (installed with XCode).