[genevra]

It's always bothered me that Apple has so little backwards compatibility. I suppose that's why Windows is used by most of the corporate world for "reliability" (more reliable than Apple), and "ease of use" (people don't want to learn command line for Linux). It's just the mid option

[LeFantome]

The incentives are very different (or used to be).

Microsoft was selling software and needed that software to work. Making it work in as much hardware as possible was a good thing.

Apple was selling hardware and needed customers to upgrade that hardware over time.

Microsoft sells hardware now too, and cares more about the cloud. So, they are not so much about deep compatibility anymore.

[chongli]

Apple's built their entire company on dropping backwards compatibility. It's how they've maintained their agility for so long, despite being one of the largest companies on the planet.

[WorldPeas]

I am prone to defend them, but they do it in a sensical way (most of the time), I plugged in a G3 whose hard drive was last written to when I was playing hopscotch and when I connected it to wifi it had an official update patch ready for me. They aren't perfect but how many other companies do that. I'd argue that their unflinchingness to move on hardware-wise, and long software support is what gave them success.

[rickdeckard]

Alas they didn't become one of the largest companies on the planet because of how they treated their macOS userbase.

Especially nowadays it seems their biggest asset became that they produce good PC-hardware on such a high economics of scale that they're almost unreachable in build-quality...

[cosmic_cheese]

I would say that counterintuitively, it’s a factor in the Mac’s strong indieware/botique software scene, which has been going for decades now. Most devs in that camp keep up with the platform changes and those who don’t get swept away, opening up space for someone else to fill that niche.

[hylaride]

They've started to drop the ball, but Apple also was really good at simplifying things to the point that its infamous "just works" slogan was apt.

I switched to mac circa 2003 and reliably connecting to wifi was simple, clean, and intuitive. This was the height of the shitshow that was wireless networking on windows, where half the time windows would fight with the vendor software, etc.

I was even more shocked when I hit the "advanced" button and there was full and working advanced BSD networking settings cleanly laid out, from overriding IP/netmask/router, 802.1X, etc. Windows made it difficult and frustrating to apply these kinds of settings, because they wanted to hide it from the user.

[p_ing]

They're a phone device manufacture, which is how they became the first or second largest company, depending on how the tariffs blow.

Mac and macOS are afterthoughts at this point.

[Agingcoder]

This is not entirely true - they’ve invested quite a bit in maintaining backwards compatibility at least hardware side through various emulation or translation layers : first during the ppc/x86 migration then more recently with the x86 to arm shift.

[whalesalad]

This isn’t true. They support old platforms for a long time.

At some point you need to move on. Can’t support ancient platforms forever.

[mschuster91]

> It's always bothered me that Apple has so little backwards compatibility.

So little? macOS Sequoia is compatible with Macs that are over seven years old [1], macOS Sonoma goes back to 2017 [2].

At that point, it doesn't make much sense for anyone to still be operating these things in a production setting because of power efficiency and lack of RAM - and all Intel macOS machines can be used with even the most cutting-edge Linux distributions anyway if you wish to further extend their service life. If you need a modern Windows though, you'll most likely want to go via a hypervisor because of TPM concerns.

The old PPC clankers, it's a miracle the hardware is still running and they haven't died from bad capacitors, Soldergate or whatever in the time.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/120282

[2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/105113

[goosedragons]

Is that good? Windows 11 officially supports computers from 2017 too, Linux way further. Ubuntu 24.04 will happily run on machines over a decade old with no problems.

And Apple has poor backwards compatibility. You can't run 32-bit Intel binaries on anything newer than 10.14. PPC has been out of the question for over 15 years. Meanwhile even on Windows on Arm you can run stuff made with XP or even Windows 98 in mind.

[pjmlp]

Apple platforms only had command line after NeXT reverse acquision, it isn't as if A/UX was a huge success, so it is kind of ironic see that mentioned.

It was specially clear in the early days of MS-DOS versus Mac OS.

[heresie-dabord]

> It's always bothered me that Apple has so little backwards compatibility.

Hear, hear!

Outside the corporate world's devices, I insist that my personal computing choices bring me either high confidence or personally useful knowledge/growth, or I will ban the product/company with malice. I banned APPL for foisting the full load of supporting older devices onto me, and MSFT Windows 11 is facing my personal banishment for kicking all older (but perfectly serviceable) hardware to the curb.

I thank the Linux ecosystem every single day.

[poulsbohemian]

I'm writing this on a ten year old Mac with specs in line with what I see on dell.com as still available in new systems, with Apple still delivering some software updates yearly. All the apps I use have been available in both Intel and Apple Silicon flavors. I'm not sure how much more I can expect from Apple / the Apple ecosphere.

[SpecialistK]

You say:

> specs in line with what I see on dell.com as still available in new systems

But I'm not sure if you mean the relative performance of an entry-level chip like the N100 or the raw numbers like "6-8 core, 3.8GHz" - the performance may be fine for your use-cases but doesn't actually compare to decade-newer chips like M2 when pushed.

> Apple still delivering some software updates yearly

They deserve a lot more credit for this transition than the PPC-Intel one, that's for sure...

[71bw]

...what Mac are you using then, again? Because I have a 2017(!!!!) MacBook Pro that's completely unusable due to its terrible performance and fans going at 100% all the time.

[opan]

Doesn't this mainly come down to Macs using weirder architectures while Windows largely stuck to the IBM PC and its clones/descendants?

I'm also seeing more software lately talking about dropping support for Windows 7 or 8 after a certain release.

[p_ing]

There's no reason today's macOS couldn't support a Classic environment, like the early releases of OS X. There are a lot of support costs surrounding such an environment, so I don't blame Apple for dropping it.

It supports x86 emulation, for now.

I believe Windows has seen more architectures than Mac OS Classic and OS X combined.

Windows 3rd party software often drops support because Microsoft doesn't support the OS. It could be the desire to use new APIs that aren't included in 7/8 (or soon to be 10), but it's hard to support an operating system as an app vendor that the OS vendor doesn't support.

I always liked VMware's statement that they would support NT4 and above -- like, no you can't.

[hahamrfunnyguy]

Apple hates when you do this but they can't stop you: I still have one of the original Intel Core Duo Mac Minis from 2006. I upgraded the HDD at one point and also installed Windows. I use it to run a CNC mill.

[graemep]

> people don't want to learn command line for Linux

The same applies to Windows and Apple's OS.

The point about the command line is that it is there for people who want it. You can use all of them without using the command line.