Windows can run the previous version of Office. But running the current version, alongside say, Office 2007, is a major pain in the ass.

Maybe you just need to run the old version of Outlook, because your IP phone system or ERP software has some plug-in that was never written for the next version and isn't compatible.

Maybe you need to run a version of Access that's so stinking old that you have to use Windows XP in a VM.

Now, to make things worse, the database connectors for that version of Access are so outdated, that it's holding the entire company back on MySQL 5.5 because if you upgraded, your Access application wouldn't work anymore.

Not to mention, all that code you wrote 20 years ago in VBA is insecure as all hell. Unencrypted connections, ripe for SQL injection, plus that version of Access can't work with large datasets or return large results. Dammit!

The ability for an application (eg, Office) to install side-by-side with other versions of itself is entirely different than its Backwards Compatibility (eg: ability for current versions to open and/or save Office 2007 format). In fact, because of the latter, provided they did a good job at it, the former is arguably irrelevant.

I'm not familiar with Office/Outlook/Access's APIs and their history of backwards compatibility, but given that Microsoft usually does a good job with BC, I'd tend to suspect the other vendors (IP phone/ERP software) are at fault. In my experience, there's a good chance the only real incompatibility is with the vendor's installer or some version check that prevents it from working, as opposed to really not actually working, say, because Microsoft removed some API they used.

The rest of what you're talking about really points to some other disfunction, or bad or unlucky decision.

Did you buy an IP phone system expecting 20 years of use from it? Why can't you get updates -- is it because you don't want to pay for maintenance, or did they go out of business?

The cascade effect you're talking about here though highlights something else: So many companies do things they think are saving money, but actually cost them more.

For example, they can't go to the latest IP phone software, because they need to buy a hardware upgrade that will cost $x, so it means they have to use old version of Access that uses old MySQL which means other development team spends $y extra working with that version (or paying for custom dev for other products to work with it, etc). Did anyone actually evaluate which is larger? The decision to "save" $20k on a phone system upgrade could easily cost $50k or more for several months of a developer's time.

I am still somewhat surprised that Windows doesn't have a Docker-esque sandboxing system to solve this problem (I mean, it has Docker, but it's based on a full VM). I suppose in the third-party realm at the very least you have Sandboxie, but meh...

Starting with Office 2016 (maybe 2013) App-V from MS does precisely what you describe and it doesn't require any sort of classic virtualization component to be accessibly by the OS or hardware.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_App-V

The tech is there. Usage is a different story.

I'd rather have planned deprecation and make choices to (at some point) abandon certain APIs, features and formats. In the case of formats, a public release of some parser code would be nice, so that if someone really wants to get some old data, they can, but other than that, stagnation isn't as good as people make it out to be.

Some things don't need intensive maintenance, and it's a bad thing to force it for unnecessary reasons. Backwards compatibility can often be understood as 10 vendor engineers performing maintenance effort so 10,000 customer engineers don't have to. It's a massive productivity win for society.

I'm a software engineer. I hate working on ancient codebases as much as the next guy, and I personally benefit from the constant make-work of re-engineering. But, as a customer, I'd rather invest my time and money to solve new problems, rather than spend it re-solving old problems.

The code and APIs will never be "perfect," and many processes change little.

Also, it's a little ambiguous who's code you're talking about: the customer's or the platform's? If a platform that maintains backwards-compatibility is an achievement worth celebrating, because it saves loads of effort across society and give people access to software who might not otherwise be able to afford it. If a platform breaks its customer's code because it's chasing after API perfection, it's kinda abusing its customers.

The theory that a platform as 'backwards compatibility' is only good for lazy developers and lost source code. And yes, not doing maintenance saves time, but so does not upgrading your platform. I mean, if 8 inch floppies work for nuclear installations, OS/2 works for subway passenger systems, and Windows 3.1 for radio servers and other flight control systems, might as well not maintain anything at all. Heck, why not use relay logic in the subway control rooms.

I think the issue here is that you're viewing this as too all-or-nothing. If the OS/2 subway software is well-tested and does everything it needs to do, what's the benefit of spending $10 million rewriting it or paying a guy to keep up with platform changes? If IBM (or whoever owns it now) keeps maintaining OS/2 so the software can run with little to no modifications on new hardware (since hardware fails), good on them. There's probably 1,000 such systems, and that's $10 billion in savings for society.

That doesn't mean no software should actively be maintained, a lot of it should. It also doesn't mean that working old systems shouldn't sometimes be replaced or upgraded. But it does mean backwards compatibility is important and shouldn't be dismissed.

As for "...means it hasn't been maintained for 20 years..." - the OS did maintain the old API's and the way they behave to make sure old software that uses said APIs still works on new OS. Does not mean that the new APIs were not developed.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=542...

Cheap bullshit, not technical limitation, is at the heart of this level of "compatibility" issues.

I’m fine with using an ephemeral toolkit to create long-lasting infra, and it even makes sense to me that some people want to sometimes write new pieces of the ephemeral toolkit to help me do that (like stylish GUI text editors or SFTP clients or notification-area service managers.)

Google is pulling similar things in the Play Store. They will pull apps just because they are not 64 bit. They delayed the deadline for a year now, because many developers really don't care.

And as a consumer it really does not matter. Why would a 32 bit app not work 10 years from now?

There are various tradeoffs to be made when considering the benefits and costs of a strategy for long-term backwards compatibility. Microsoft was traditionally on the "it will continue to work until the heat death of the universe" end of the spectrum, and Apple on the "we will be dropping support soon" end. That is, Microsoft invests a bunch of effort into ensuring old software will continue to run on new platforms, whereas Apple prefers to drop support for various platform features (68k, PPC, 32-bit) with a few years of notice.

In some cases and for some users, backwards compatibility has a value that is worth the cost paid in development time, testing, and complexity. For others, it is not. I've been a Mac user since the G4 days, and I don't think I've ever really been in the situation where I thought "oh I need to run this old software but it's no longer supported" – that is, the feature has no value to me. And I'm pretty confident that the things I produce will continue to have value in the future.

TLDR – other people are different to you sometimes.

Also, many developers use Macs not because they're in love, but because of the practical conveniences of working on a Unix-based OS.

I have about a dozen small very specific scientific 'calculators' (only the windows/linux ones that still run, the mac ones are all dead which is a darn shame since there were some jewels out there) that were written by researchers 10-20 years ago and never updated since. They haven't been touched by the original developer in years, in fact many of their host websites have been lost to the ages so they exist only through sharing on forums and whatnot. But, since they do not need any sort of connection to the outside world (times were simpler back then you see...) they still run fine in compatibility mode. For some of them their functionality can be replicated with modern software (probably in a web app or something), but the original tools still work perfectly for their jobs and are still useful today. Don't even get me started on all of the equipment which is stuck running windows 98 because of the serial port library used to communicate with the equipment was using the dos api...

examples: Psst! - https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~psst/

Laser Line - http://www.skywise711.com/laserline/

I also use a number of paid tools that I paid for back in the '90s or early 2000's and haven't felt compelled to 'upgrade'. They run great and give me the answers I need, so until the vendor has added actual useful features (instead of reskinning them with a flat/metro interface...) I see no reason to upgrade.

About 2 years ago or so I think I was shocked to discover that they're still using said device and the software in unmodified form running it under DOSBox or something like that

The point is there isn't much of it relative to the wider ecosystem. One particularly important reason for that is security. Most of the dependencies for software written 20+ years ago have long since been EOL'd and are therefore vulnerable.

At my work there is code from 1980's written for IBM mainframe in PL/I language still running. Has seen minor changes over the years but very much 40 year old code at the heart of it. This code has basically had continuous uptime since then. I work at industrial plant I have heard not uncommon for Banks, insurance companies, power plants etc to have similar setups with same vintage of software.

We have C and C++ code from the 90's originally written for RS/6000 era Unix boxes. That stuff is pushing 30 now. still actively maintained.

There is Fortran with genesis dating back to 80's still being run today.

A 30 year lifespan for industrial equipment is not uncommon it would be nuts to replace control software and things like that so often.

Dude, if you are trolling, don’t. If you aren’t, also don’t.

I know that sounds like I am some kind of fanboy. I assure you I am not. I wish I could go back to Ubuntu where I feel most at home. But the fact that I think so little about my OS that I forget it is there is what makes this so easy for me to stay.

Backwards compatibility is about shit working! You can't have that when a program you want to use stops working because the OS broke backwards compatibility.

I have used an iMac for a long time, every time there is a new version of the OS something breaks and in some cases there isn't a way to fix it. My 2009 iMac went through several OS upgrades and pretty much half of the installed software doesn't work anymore and in most cases i cannot even upgrade - either because i bought the software outside of MAS (which didn't exist at the time i made some of those purchases), or because the developer stopped supporting the software (including some of Apple's own software - e.g. i really like iWeb, though Apple doesn't anymore) or simply because the developer doesn't exist anymore. Or i just prefer the version i have over the version the developer would want me to use (because they bloated it up, added ads or whatever reason).

Yeah, when i first started using macOS i had pretty much the same stance as you. It went away when thing started breaking left and right over the years. There is no "shit just working" if the OS breaks said shit.

(of course in the 2009 iMac's case that isn't very relevant anymore since Apple decided a 3GHz Core 2 Duo isn't enough to run their OS, but it still happens with some newer Macs i have)

And just curious when was the last time you used a non-MS OS as your daily computer? Am I close with a guess of “not in the last 10 years”?

You made a patronizing remark about millions of people you don't know. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21452097)

To follow up with this comment and putting yourself on a pedestal is definitely trolling, and not very creative either.

I mean, the people "typing on their MacBooks" combined together have resulted in a company with THE highest value ever in human history, and is copied by all the other companies that you champion.

2. But that's not how "most valuable" is usually rated by analysts: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alapshah/2018/08/02/apple-hits-...

3. There are privately held companies that are probably "more valuable", like Saudi Aramco

4. I don't know what I've done (which you asked in your original post), but I know I'm not a fanboy/shill/astroturfer for Apple.

> but I know I'm not a fanboy/shill/astroturfer for Apple.

No, you're just a hateful individual suffering from brand envy.

See? Assumptions are easy and fun indeed!

* Here's a fun exercise: try to dump your iCloud passwords in cleartext so you can scan for potentially compromised passwords on forgotten systems (using shell commands, not a proprietary password manager.) OSX doesn't even generate messages to acknowledge that it's designed to not let you do this.

Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch

The answer to Office/Adobe/gaming is simply don't do it, get someone else to do it, or get a different job. Your time is better spent on stuff like python data science, which Linux supports better than anything else out there.

If you must, run Windows 10 in a VM. If you're doing heavy duty video editing or Photoshop, get a second GPU just for the Windows 10 VM[1].

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...

I am not sure recommending someone to get a different job is a good idea simply because of the choice of their operating system... I'm a huge linux fan, both of my personal laptops have linux and have been using it since 2006. But I still know that realistically it's not the best OS for certain tasks, like gaming. That's why my gaming PC has Windows on it.

Allow me to direct you to the Security APIs, which would make your task a couple lines of code that's as permissive as you'd like it to be: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/1398306-s....

And if you find this observation unwarranted: you not only made a sweeping generalization against everyone who does X, you authoritatively dismiss all FUTURE potential of their work. It must take no small amount of bitterness to see things that way.

As far as backwards compatibility though - MS’s new ARM based Surface won’t run 64 bit x86 Windows apps and run 32 bit x86 apps slowly and still gets half the advertised life of iPads.

Windows on Surface took 12GB of hard drive space compared to about 3GB for iOS on iPads.

Where did you find those numbers?

https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/10/apple-mac-sales-drop-q4...

In Q4 of 2018, Apple sold 4.9 million Macs. Lenovo alone sold 16.6 million PC's. All brands except apple sold 63.7 million.

I could include Watches and AppleTVs but those are far from generally purpose computing devices.

But regardless, if you are referring to “successful”. Which I’m discussing, success from a business standpoint is profitable. Apple is definitely making more in profit and revenue than Microsoft. As in, Apple had the more successful strategy.

There are plenty of people whose only computing device is a phone and others who are hardly ever use a computer for personal use. Even the iPhone can keep up performance wise with some low end PCs being sold.

But I said variants. But, if you take MacOS out, the statement remains.

And seeing that iOS is now running Microsoft Office a version of Photoshop and is using more powerful processors than most x86 based PCs, we can complete take out MacOS and just iOS.

I said nothing about popularity, I was saying successful. Success in a business isn’t marketshare or popularity its profitability. Seeing how little profit that OEMs are making selling either Android devices (most of whom are losing money - except for Samsung) or PCs, I wouldn’t be surprised that Apple is more successful than all of the PC makers combined selling Macs and its well known that Apple captures more than 70% of the profit in mobile.

A company can’t stay viable based on “marketshars”. Next am I arguing what’s “best”. Do you think Dell would rather be in Apple’s position with “market share” or Apple’s in Dell’s?

There are plenty of people whose only personal computing device is their phone either by choice or necessity. Heck I am a developer and the only thing I use my computer at home for is as a Plex server.

It’s on my list to get a powerful enough NAS to transcode movies and I won’t even use it for that. I’ll run Plex and bit torrent (to uhh download Linux ISO’s) and B2 backed cloud backup app directly on it.

My wife gave her computer to our son because she uses her iPad for everything including Office.

Now that Apple (finally) supports a mouse, I connect my same Bluetooth keyboard+mouse to my iPad that I use for my work computer when I bring it home.

The people you know. Not everyone can afford to buy a desktop computer, and for many of these people a phone is their primary computing device.

As an outsider, it is very difficult for me to understand Apple's story on whether these devices are, or are not, on the same OS; what its/their "root" was; and what's the future direction (separate OS, or convergence, and if latter which one will form the core and which one will transform). The newest "iPad OS" or whatever it is called does not help matters - again, as an outsider, I cannot tell if this is a marketing differentiation or a true one.

All that being said, I rather thought that iPhones & iPads run "iOS", and Macs run "OSX", and that they were different.

Apple acquired Next and they combined some parts of classic MacOS and NextStep to create OS X.

Apple then stripped OS X down, got rid of some Mac specific parts, added some new frameworks to create “iPhone OS” and introduced the iPhone Initially they claimed that the iPhone was “.running OS X”.

They introduced the iPod Touch later the same year and the iPad 3 years later at this point, they renamed “iPhone OS” to “iOS”.

They introduced watchOS and tvOS as more variants of iOS. There is also some iOS variant running on HomePods.

Over the years the two operating systems have both somewhat diverged and they still share both some old code and new code between the two.

This year, they renamed the version of iOS running on the iPad “iPadOS” as they started adding more iPad specific features.

They also introduced the “Catalyst” framework to bring iOS specific frameworks to the Mac to make porting from iPad to the Mac easier.

Finally, they introduced Swift UI as a common cross platform framework for watchOS, iOS, macOS, iPadOS and tvOS.

- Cocoa

- Objective-C

- XNU

It used to be all based on pure Darwin (also from Apple, but OSS). But since the iOS releases it has been diversified too much and Apple no longer wanted to backport to their own OSS (but they still backport to all GPLv2 and lower).

Oh, come on. That's profoundly misleading and you know it.

Yes.

Which is just two variants

meanwhile Windows 7 support will end in 2020 and is still being sold

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4057281/windows-7-s...

I didn’t say that MS isn’t good at maintaining backwards compatibility. My mom in fact uses my old Mac Mini 1.66Ghz Core Duo introduced in 2006 running Windows 7 and I just retired a Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop introduced in 2009 from running my Plex Server running Windows 10.

I’m saying that it hasn’t been a sound business strategy as the rest of the tech industry has moved on. Windows (not Microsoft) has failed in the cloud, the web browser market, and mobile.

I don't agree on the Cloud, it's the strongest competitor to Amazon, and on the other businesses there is no competition: mobile and browser is Google.

Amazon failed as well in the mobile business.

As far as mobile being “google”. In terms of revenue, it came out in the Oracle lawsuit that Android has only made Google about $33 billion its entire existence. Less than the amount that Apple makes in two quarters on iPhones. Google also reportedly still pays Apple $8 billion a year to bectge default search engine in Apple devices.

as a server, maybe.

as a client not really.

> Android has only made Google about $33 billion its entire existence

Yeah, they are good at hiding profits

and they are an ADV company which dominated the mobile market because it was strategic, they don't need to profit from selling (and manufacturing) the HW, they just need your screen time.

There are between 2.5 and 3 billion android devices around the world.

And it's almost impossible to own an android devices without Google SW on it.

> Less than the amount that Apple makes in two quarters on iPhones.

That's not really true, and iPhone revenues are declining every year.

In 2018 thy made $33.36 billions, down of 9.2% from the previous year.

If Apple loses the mobile market, it's finished.

But people would still watch YouTube advs on iPhone replacements.

You think Google lied under discovery? Oracle wasn’t just counting their meager hardware sells but they were also counting as sales, Google Play revenue etc.

And it's almost impossible to own an android devices without Google SW on it.

There is a country that has over 1 billion people running Android with no Google Services.

That's not really true, and iPhone revenues are declining every year.

And it’s still about the same as MS’s revenue last quarter at 38 billion

If Apple loses the mobile market, it's finished.

Apple is far more diversified than Google. Almost all of Google’s profits come from advertising, 48% of Apple’s revenue come from the iPhones.

The Mac business by itself is about the size of McDonald’s the last time I checked.

Estimates for Youtube is that it’s barely profitable if at all.

I think the known taxable profits are only a fraction of the real profits.

Don't jump to conclusions, just because you wanna prove a point.

> There is a country that has over 1 billion people running Android with no Google Services.

so you're agreeing with me: it's almost impossible, the alternative is live in China and give up your freedom.

Because you can't use Chinese services outside China.

There's also that.

Anyway Google China it's a thing.

And at this point I would prefer China spying on me than Google.

Maybe Europe should start banning US services as well...

> Apple is far more diversified than Google.

Is it?

Mac HW is less than 10% of their revenues.

What else they produce?

Could Apple really survive out of wearables or iPads or iCloud without iPhones?

I seriously doubt it.

> Estimates for Youtube is that it’s barely profitable if at all.

Nobody knows how big YouTube really is

Estimates are in the range 16-25 billion dollars / year

This is a fancy way of saying that Apple sells more watches and phones than Microsoft does computers, which is a whole lot less impressive than the disinformation version you wrote above.

When I look at the microsoft ecosystem: something like 90% of all computers, nearly every corporation and business in the world, etc, I don't see anything to be ashamed of.

How is it “disinformation”? Do you think anyone on HN doesn’t understand the statement to mean what I said for it to mean? I said nothing about the computers MS sells (the Surface line). I said Windows PCs in general.

Microsoft sells a lot of Windows licenses to business and consumers but all of the energy from a development and usage standpoint is on the web. I bet most businesses could replace a lot of their computers with Chrome OS boxes and not miss a beat.

Apple sells a >$1000 phone labeled for "Professionals" which comes with 32GB of on board memory.... total. When you upcharge high end customers $150 for a $15 stick of NAND, yeah, people are more touchy about 8GB of system file

It’s not about the “system file”. It’s also about RAM usage. Lowend Surface laptops come with the same amount of storage as iPads but between using x86 chips that are a lot slower and less energy efficient and the boost of Windows, it’s nowhere near the same experience.

No iPhone Pro comes with less than the 64GB of storage. Do you really want to talk about marginal price and marginal cost? A Windows license has no marginal cost.

At least one person[0] didn't understand and publicly stated as much. While iOS was originally spun off from macOS, it's very much it's own system, with there being no ability to run macOS applications on iOS, and vice versa (although the latter is slowly changing with recent macOS releases). Comparing the two is disingenuous at best.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21452862

EDIT: And here's at least one more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21453368

Most iOS app can run on MacOS - the iPhone simulator compiles iOS code natively to x86 and links to an x86 version of the iOS frameworks.

Apple also introduced both catalyst and SwiftUI to make porting back and forth easier.

And yes “words mean things”. I specifically said “variants.” So if again you want to be pedantic, I could just as easily say that Apple sells more iOS devices than all Windows PC makers combined.

Also, if you want to try to exclude iPads from the iOS ecosystem because Apple now calls it “iPadOS”, iPads can still run iPhone apps.

Yeah, except no app developer ships their simulator build to customers to run in the iOS Simulator…

Even in their crowning achievement - the cloud, they are a distant second to AWS and Amazon always brags that they run more Windows instances in AWS than Microsoft runs on Azure.

MS’s revenue is half that of Apple’s and they have lower profits. Heck, last quarter Apple made about the same as Microsoft even if you subtract iPhone revenue.

They missed out on mobile for sure, but it's not because of their focus on the enterprise or backwards compatibility, and you'll have a very hard time proving so. Also they haven't missed out on the web either, and neither can you prove that they did. Just because there is a bigger cloud provider doesn't mean that they 'missed out'. And there will be bigger fish to fry, new technologies are coming out every year.

Apple and Microsoft are in vastly different spaces. Apple focuses on consumer products, Microsoft makes its money from the enterprise. An Apples to orange comparison is not meaningful.

As far as mobile, Apple was able to take its much smaller less bloated OS, cut it down to a size that could fit on a device with 128MB of RAM and have for what at the time was a full featured web browser. Did you ever use IE on a Win CE device?

And are you forgetting that Microsoft was the dominant consumer operating platform before mobile? MS didn’t have any choice but to retreat to Enterprise.

So what “bigger technologies” do you see coming out then mobile? The smart phone already has an 80%+ worldwide penetration rate of adults.

They run windows at Google HQ and AWS but you don't see anyone saying Google and Amazon "missed out"

Besides, if you're comparing MS and Apple, you need to include all the VMs running Windows (it's not a physical device - but MS makes the same amount of money on it), and also MS's foothold in Cloud.

Apple practically does not exist in those spaces, and Microsoft would have been in the same position had it broke compat as often as Apple does on the desktop.

Maybe to a troll or someone with an axe to grind, but my point of view is different.

If you’re doing the same exact thing 5 years later (let alone 10 or even 20) without any tweaks in your process, then frankly you have a job a robot should be doing.

I’ve got production code I wrote twenty years ago still up and running, despite multiple upgrades to the language and hosting Infrastucture itself that it’s running on. Should that be the case? Not in my opinion. Business needs change, that code should’ve been updated. Instead developers just added on more around it and that’s how you get bloated beasts like MS Office, Photoshop, etc.

Banks and insurance companies tends to disagree with you.

Maintaining software is just like maintaining buildings, if you don't they fall apart, but mainly it's just about checking that everything is still the same it was when it was built.

You don't change elevators in a building just because the old model is not supported anymore.

There's no conceot of "not maintained anymore" for elevators.

So maybe the poster was trolling, but it is true that you cannot rely on Macs if your software has a predicted life span longer than a couple of years.

> Business needs change

Again, many established businesses work because they don't change much over time.

They just keep doing what they do best.

> that code should’ve been updated.

That code worked, why in the hell risking to introduce new bugs?

I worked on software packages made by millions of lines, you don't just update them because your supplier won't bother supporting your workflow for at least 10 years.

Even Github, a modern fast changing company, was running on Rails 3.2 that was released in 2012 until September 2018, they switched to 5.2 and it took a tech company with some of the smartest engineers around and Rails contributors one year and a half.

Find me a robot that can navigate 4x4 trails and identify rocks with accuracy.

None exist.

And that kind of prospecting hasn't changed in centuries.

There's at least one doing so right this very moment on Mars, though it's pretty slow at it.