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Comment by sgift | Hacker News Reader

Your comment reminds me of a time when the same was said about Microsoft. It will be interesting to see when/if Apple falls the same way MS did.

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That is rubbish, Microsoft never acted like this. They allways favoured backwards compatibility. Apple OTOH has behaved this through their entire existence. Yet Apple still grew to a large company.

Quite the contrary it is this behaviour which has saved Apple. It made sure they could move forward with new technology quickly.

MS moves slowely because they accumulate so much cruft pulling them down. That is the flip side of always being backwards compatible and "nice" to the customers.

> Apple OTOH has behaved this through their entire existence.

Rosetta, Carbon and the Mac 68k Emulator are examples of the exact opposite.

Apple does not hesitate moving forwards, but historically they provided large amounts of backwards compatibility, just not as cruft inside the existing system.

Rosetta was also removed after two or three releases. 32 bit support for applications in iOS was also supported for a couple of releases and is now gone.

How is that not similar? I can't still run Rosetta to this date...

> Rosetta was also removed after two or three releases.

4 years.

> How is that not similar? I can't still run Rosetta to this date...

iOS 11 removed 32b support to hardware which supports it, Rosetta added PPC support to hardware which did not.

Something similar to Rosetta would be emulating Aarch32 after having removed hardware support for it, not removing software support for Aarch32 despite the hardware implementing it.

4 years

Apple's cadence of releasing Mac OS upgrades was a lot slower back then. x86 Macs were introduced with 10.4. Two releases later (10.7) they dropped support for PPC apps and 32 bit Macs.

I think Apple has a far greater advantage than MS did (if not quite the marketshare, although the markets are different). MS was never seen as 'cool' or an aspirational status symbol like Apple products are.

Fair point. I always thought that was mainly due to Steve Jobs, but so far it looks like they're able to stay one without him.

> MS was never seen as 'cool' or an aspirational status symbol like Apple products are.

Sure it was.

In Portugal during the 90's, there were lots of CS students applying to work there.

Apple not so much, specially since they were about to close, and except for the Interlog shops in Lisbon, it was almost impossible to get an affordable device in a country where the average salary was about 400 euros on today's money.

>if Apple falls the same way MS did

Are we thinking of the same MS?

What MS are you thinking of? Back in the day (I'm thinking 20 years ago), anything MS said was law. They had the power to destroy all other browsers so we were left with just IE6 for so many years. MS no longer has that kind of power. They can no longer dictate the technological landscape like they used to be able to do. Now the landscape is dictated by standards and consensus set forth by Google, Facebook, Apple, MS, etc.

Ms only fall on mobile platform. Desktop app has good backward compartibility. Because of politic inside microsoft, every version of mobile platform has different language. Wp6.5 wp7 wp 7.1 wp8 win10 . 5 times must change the source code make developer escape to android. Microsoft at that era was untrusted

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