Supporting everything forever is how you end up with Windows

Here I was thinking the problem with Windows was the dog-slow RAM hogs the team replaced most of the core applications with so they could serve web ads in the launcher and OS chrome. Silly me, the real problem with Windows is that it can run old apps if you still have the exe kicking around.

You think the worst thing about windows is one ofnthe best things about windows?

Not really, Apple was doing something right at that point they got almost everything from classic to OSX, ppc to Intel, from 32bit to 64bit, x86 to ARM.

I used it through all of that and really at no point was it feeling forced and the only one with real friction was classic mode the rest felt seamless.

They must have just been doing something right with dev relations and community.

Although I will say now a lot of people don’t seem to care with keeping up with far less extreme random iOS hurdles.

Windows has many flaws, being able to run any binary made in the past 30 years is not one of them.

You mean, being able to run binaries from 25 years ago? Yes, please!

They had the classic environment. They could have kept that going.

Business decision, pure and simple. Value added and risk of people not moving forward was not worth the cost to them. They were also way smaller at the time than today, though the iPod had taken off.

I’m fine with them eventually dropping support for things. Some things I think they do too early.

Microsoft HAS to keep supporting stuff forever. That’s their bread and butter. Line of business apps. If they drop support businesses lose THE reason to stay with them.

It’s far less of an issue for Apple. And people do leave because of it. But not enough. It’s also one of the reasons (of many) they’re not very popular in business.

> They had the classic environment. They could have kept that going.

Not for long. The Classic environment depended on the system having a PowerPC CPU - it would not have run on Intel systems. (Rosetta translation would not have been applicable.)

I know it didn’t last long. But why do you say Rosetta wouldn’t have worked?

The Classic environment depended on the system having a PowerPC CPU.

For essentially the same reason that Rosetta 2 can't be used to run Windows - they're userspace JIT translators, not system-level emulators. The Classic Environment was, for all intents and purposes, an entire virtualized PowerPC system running Mac OS 9, and allowed software running inside it to do some pretty wild things like patching system "trap" routines, writing graphics directly to the framebuffer, or even setting breakpoints in and handling exceptions from other applications.

Windows did not even support Final Fantasy 7 between two versions due to their broken Direct X design. Let's bury that turkey; just because there are compelling blog posts doesn't mean they are a legitimate reflection of Microsoft.

As a customer I expect my software to work, permanently. Don't expect me to cry for the richest companies in the world.

Linux hasn't even bothered continuing supporting processors in the same family, dropping support for 386:

* https://www.zdnet.com/article/good-bye-386-linux-to-drop-sup...

and more recently, 486:

* https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-devs-start...

and here we are expecting support for completely different CPU classes. :)

Supporting very old hardwares and supporting less than a decade old softwares are two very different things.