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Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

Windows 7 was end of life'd in January of 2015. I don't think this is some kind of evil business decision Microsoft made. Switching to Linux isn't a magical way to ensure your OS version will be supported for the rest of eternity. Linux is great for many things, but give the Microsoft/Windows is evil thing a rest.

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They're also not supporting Windows 8 which is not EOL yet.

The evil business decision was to make Windows 10 a steaming pile of malware. Everything else follows from that. If running Windows 10 weren't such a big security risk, end-of-lifing Windows 7 and 8 wouldn't be a problem.

OSX is sending just as much telemetry back to Apple, but it's less hipster to call their OS a steaming pile of malware...

Citation needed.

Windows 10 "Basic" level telemetry: https://technet.microsoft.com/itpro/windows/configure/basic-...

macOS Sierra Privacy policy and analytics: https://www.apple.com/privacy/privacy-policy/ https://support.apple.com/kb/PH25654?locale=en_US&viewlocale...

> With your explicit consent, we may collect data about how you use your device and applications in order to help app developers improve their apps.

That is all Apple's policy has to say about Telemetry collection. It doesn't say when or how it gains consent.

With Windows you can't install without consent. I'm not going to re-image my Mac to check but I wouldn't at all be surprised if consent was part of that first boot EULA that you agree to.

Ultimately you find Microsoft's transparency on the matter is unsettling but Apple's hand waving "Trust us to do the right thing" is ok?

Also, I've never heard of any OS vendor, microsoft or otherwise, abusing telemetry data. They're incentivized to not abuse this data.

I think MacOS gives you an off switch for the telemetry. I know iOS does. Not only does iOS give you an easy way to turn it off, it will also show you the raw data being sent to Apple.

Microsoft does neither. You can't turn it off easily if you're not on Enterprise / Education, and the data being sent is encrypted.

the enterprise edition has telemetry too, which can't be completely disabled

You're right. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 isn't getting patches for Kaby Lake either. Those evil bastards.

The difference is that according to this:

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

Windows 7 still has twice as large install base as Windows 10. It's literally nothing other than MS stopping support for 7 because 10 is out - imagine the outrage if Tesla stopped supporting an older model S because a new one was out.

The main difference is that here Microsoft arbitrarily put a check for the cpuid in while Kaby Lake is probably as compatible with Windows 7 as any previous 64bit Intel CPU. Windows 3.11 doesn't have this, if you have any i386 compatible CPU it will run just fine and will happily apply all available patches.

> The main difference is that here Microsoft arbitrarily put a check for the cpuid in while Kaby Lake is probably as compatible with Windows 7 as any previous 64bit Intel CPU. Windows 3.11 doesn't have this, if you have any i386 compatible CPU it will run just fine and will happily apply all available patches.

IIRC, the compatibility problems with the new processors are processor drivers and power management.

However, the dumb thing is that Microsoft already made the engineering effort to support those things, since they used to support Windows 7 on the now-unsupported architectures. Now they're taking it away to push Windows 10 some more.

It checked the DOS version and errored out on non-MS implementations of DOS.

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