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Comment by rythie | Hacker News Reader

It's not apathy or incompetence that means people are using these old OSes, usually it's that you can't upgrade (and the users don't have the money to upgrade the hardware). Windows 7 won't run on a typical XP machine due to lack of RAM and OSX 10.9 doesn't work on 32bit machines (pre 2007).

Halting support won't do much about this issue, people will just use vulnerable browser on these old vulnerable OSes because they can't afford a new(er) one.

A 10 year old computer ought to still be usable. Especially if you think about developing countries where often people can't afford new computers. Microsoft and Apple have failed the users and now Google is too.

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Last time I checked, Debian and many other Linux distributions still work perfectly on 10 year old computers.

Microsoft, Apple, Google (and to some extent, Canonical) might have collectively decided that there's no money to be made from people in developing countries with 10 year old computers, but if you look at it from another perspective, this is the perfect chance for FOSS to increase mindshare.

>A 10 year old computer ought to still be usable.

Usable maybe, updated with new OS updates though?

Those either costs money to develop (if we're talking point, security etc updates to long dead OS versions), or stalls the development of new features (if any new OS version must run in 10 year old PCs).

I'm not sure that it does to be honest. UI effects can be disabled on older machines.

Cameras, Cars, Microwaves, Washing machines & DVD players all last 10 years or more easily. A 2006 Macbook had 512MB (upgradable to 2GB) and 1.8Ghz CPU, which is not really much different to modern netbook.

>I'm not sure that it does to be honest. UI effects can be disabled on older machines.

Yes, but UI effects are just the tip of the iceberg of new features. Some depend on the specific hardware capabilities (e.g. bluetooth being present, or even specific version), others involve several components working in tandem and depend on increased speed of later machines, others require specific cpu/gpu support, etc.

>Cameras, Cars, Microwaves, Washing machines & DVD players all last 10 years or more easily.

And all of these have 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less complexity, plus they're not general purpose devices.

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