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Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

I'm out of the loop here - I thought windows 10 would be the last version of windows released, and it would just have rolling updates for the foreseeable future?

What changed?

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Apple took MacOS to 11.

Seriously that’s probably more than half the reason.

That's absolutely my suspicion, too. Just look at all this hype. The smaller part of the reason is breaking compatibility with some hardware.

But macOS 12 will release just before Windows 11 does (shortly after fall iPhone announcement vs. holiday season), since Apple has abandoned the use of yearly point releases for good. So that wouldn't work out very well for MS.

But why would Microsoft care about that? Having the bigger OS number is really unimportant, else ChromeOS would dominate at version 90. Also, if that was really the case, they should've made the jump earlier and/or directly go to 12.

Firefox is at about version 90 too.

Perhaps Windows and MacOS track version numbers the same way as Firefox and Chrome.

> Having the bigger OS number is really unimportant

I can tell that you don’t work in marketing.

Marketing. People got downright hyphy about Big Sur and the M1 chip, and Microsoft, by comparison, has had virtually zero excitement points in the past decade. Having a new product renews interest in the brand. I haven't run Windows in years, but you bet your ass that when I saw 'Windows 11' I was like, whoa, what's this all about? Turns out it's a pretty tame, incremental update with a major version number slapped on, but I still clicked to find out what was up. That's worth something.

90 is super far out - obviously out of scope. But when numbers are close they get compared.

(I personally think we may see MacOS numbers start to move about as fast as iPhone numbers)

They wanted to look like a dynamic and innovative company so they released a new theme and gave it a brand new version number? That or windows 10 still leave too much control of the machine to the user in their eyes... I think I'll watch that particular disaster from a safe distance.

Must be partly due to the drastically changed minimum requirements. Would have been awkward to say Window 10.8364837 and earlier need this, but Windows 10.837492 and later need this. Support for Windows 10.8364837 will end in 2025.

They learnt how bad rolling updates are.

I used to use Arch until a libpng upgrade broke everything.

Their minds :)

They simply didn't forsee this far into the future

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