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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

>had they been supporting old hardware, software on new hardware would have been measurably worse

Might not have been measurable, and might just cost an extra engineer without really harming anything.

If they had gone 64-bit-only, I'd be much more in agreement with you. But if you're still supporting a 32 bit platform, you have a lot of restrictions put on you, and the marginal cost of keeping support for a second 32 bit platform is not a big deal.

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You vastly underestimate both how different these old systems are, how many resources it takes to support every additional platform, that the burden increases non-linearly, and what kind of weird release-blocking bugs those extra platforms may introduce, delaying fixes and hogging resources.

At minimum, slow systems require gracefully degrading GUI, which increases complexity by an order of magnitude. The graphics card capabilities are a much better first approximation than the word width.

If it took just a few extra engineers, or a few thousand, to fix the bugs that they have, Apple would have done it. The Mythical Man-Month, and all that.

They still support slow systems, just ones that happen to be 64 bit. You're being ridiculous when you say a few thousand engineers couldn't do it. This could be almost completely separate from ongoing development. man-month would not be a problem.

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