Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
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.
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Well, there have not been any paid upgrades since Windows 10 for several years (unless you are upgrading from Home to Professional or something like that). And I haven’t seen any indication that will change soon. Their income is more or less split equally 3 ways: productivity & business processes, cloud services, and personal computing (Office subscriptions, Windows licenses, hardware). Cloud services is growing the fastest.
My computers (apart from the one my employer bequeaths for work) are both over 10 years old, one MacBook Pro and an HP EliteBook. I don’t really need a new computer, but will probably get my wife an iMac of some sort (21.5 most likely). Her Windows computer is nearly as old as mine and needs external fan blowing on it as one of the screws holding the CPU heat sink down sheared off, and she is constantly cursing Microsoft for all the constant updates and baffling notifications they send out.