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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

Holy backwards compatibility, Microsoft!

Raymond Chen has lot of good stories about the lengths Microsoft would go to to ensure old programs still worked.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/tag/history

Yes, one of my favorite bloggers for more years than I can count. What is crazy isn’t just how crazy the stories he has to share are but also just how many of them he has. You’d think with the craziness bar set so high he wouldn’t have this much content, but he still manages to be one of the most prolific bloggers!

Try it now MacOS X

I'm ok with Apple having different priorities so long as it benefits the end users of the product (and I'm sure some people will go to lengths to make up end user benefits ) but whenever I use OS X I just don't see any benefits of not having backwards compatibility - it's not faster than Windows , nor stabler, it's not like it updates faster and it's only getting iOS features backported. So it feels like not caring about backward compat is just a self serving easy way out for Apple.

> “ it's not faster than Windows , nor stabler”

Couldn’t disagree more; ctrl-alt-del gets a LOT of use on every Windows OS and client software combination I’ve ever used - I can’t even remember the equivalent hotkey on MacOS although it’s now been my daily driver for ~2 years of heavy use.

Cmd-Opt-Esc on a Mac is analogous to Ctrl-Shift-Esc on a Windows machine (Cmd-Alt-Del brings you back to the login page with a button to open task manager on post-Vista Windows PCs).

I don't remember using Ctrl+Alt+Del on any personal Windows machine either. It's the corporate client systems that make you use it for login. Heck on surface devices you don't even have to touch the keyboard to login :)

I haven't had the need to kill anything using task manager either so not sure what I would use CAD for.

I have to force quit apps all the time on macOS. I'll admit I also routinely forget the key combination, but that's just because the Dock makes force quitting easy, and the Windows task bar does not (afaik).

Recent versions of Windows have gotten pretty good at identifying programs that aren't responding and offering to close them; it's gotten pretty rare that I actually have to open Task Manager to close a program. macOS, on the other hand, never offers to kill a hanging program-- it'll let an application beach ball for hours until you go out of your way to force quit it via the Dock or keyboard shortcut.

At any rate, the applications that make up most of my daily work are all really stable these days-- we've come a long way since the Classic MacOS and Windows 9x days where application (and OS) crashes and freezes were a daily occurence.

Are you a time traveler? Ctrl-alt-del brings up task manager or the login dialog. While I do frequently have to shut down an application forcibly, I don't think I've had Windows itself crash in years. Or at least enough months I've forgotten about the last time.

> So it feels like not caring about backward compat is just a self serving easy way out for Apple.

I think there is more to it. I think is because they actually don't want obsolete software to be seen on their computers. Imagine people posting a picture with a Macbook on Instagram, and you see some ugly 1990 piece of software running on it. Not cool. So from time to time they remove whole frameworks, to force developers to re-implement the app in a new one, which is prettier. If no one is still around to maintain the app, that's ok too.

This is why you don't see any ugly software on Macs, they make sure to purge it every 5 years or so.

This is the only kind of backward compatibility Apple cares about:

https://youtu.be/Ja1vMy88_bA

It also lowers the chances that there will be free software competing with paid software offered in the app store, which apple receives revenue from.

I agree with what you write about performance and stability, but there is one other metric where MacOS has always excelled: Consistency. From the way hotkeys work to how screen elements look, to how macs interact with other Apple products in your possession.

Note: I switched to Win10+WSL in 2018 - it's a good and productive environment, but I do miss certain aspects of MacOS still. I think valuing consistency over backwards compatibility is a valuable choice, as long as the people in charge have very good taste. Not so sure about that anymore in recent iterations though.

> Consistency

Good point, I can definitely see how removing backward compat helps with UI consistentcy. Consistentcy doesn't have to come at the expense of compatibility for a mature desktop operating system but yeah for people valuing consistentcy over everything else thats a good thing.

You could argue the more time Apple spends maintaining legacy code the less time they have for other work.

Personally I thought the whole 32-bit thing was blown out of proportion. It wasn't long between Apples shift to Intel and 64-bit machines becoming the norm. The majority of software got updated and a few vocal haters complained a lot on HN.

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