Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
There is a world of difference between not running an OS and not running apps. Of course you need a 64bit OS to run a 64bit machine but the OS Microsoft supplies will run 32 bit apps just fine. They still have 32 bit support and I run D-Fend Reloaded and then can run 16 bit apps including DOS apps as well.
Dale
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That's pretty much the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft supports legacy apps almost forever. They made that clear many, many years ago when I was still writing Windows apps. Apple went the other way and purposefully broke undocumented API calls to try to keep everyone sticking with the documented API. For the most part, as long as application developers kept up with things, the apps worked. It was the orphaned apps that stopped working over time.
The consequences of those two different design decisions was that Windows came close to collapsing under it's own weight. It was a big reason that certain Windows releases were major failures. Mac didn't have that issue.
The big thing to recall is that Microsoft is a software company that made a lot of it's money by selling the operating system to hardware manufacturers, (very few people actually bought the Windows operating system as a stand alone) and the end users didn't want their copy of Word Perfect to suddenly stop working. I would not be shocked if there were still people out there running DOS and Windows 3.1.
Apple is a hardware company that gives the operating system away for free. They make the upgrades to the new version free, while Microsoft charges for their upgrades.