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Comment by rudd | Hacker News Reader

I will say this: Apple is not afraid to leave old technology behind. While website XYZ aims to support multiple versions of every browser, including those released a decade ago (IE6), Apple won't even support Leopard with its new store, which was the version that came with the Mac I got just over a year ago.

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Supporting old browsers by XYZ: you have to, to profit.

Supporting old OS by Apple: of course they want you to upgrade, to profit.

I would not say that's because Apple is brave, it makes business sense.

By the very same logic Microsoft should push as strong as Apple because it makes even more business sense for them. They don't sell hardware. Their profit comes entirely in software. Do we see the same behavior? Hell no.

And risk alienating large businesses who want business critical legacy apps supported? I don't think so. It wouldn't make sense for Microsoft.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, because I don't have the figures to back this up, but I'd imagine most of Apple's revenue from Macs comes from the home, rather than a business environment. It's easier to convince a home user to upgrade to the latest and shiniest version than it is to convince a cautious and conservative IT department.

it makes even more business sense for them

not necessarily. MSFT doesn't make PCs, unlike AAPL.

If you look at the history of Apple this is something that they do often when they believe in something strongly. Removing the floppy drive, being one that I remember very strongly. I feel Leopard support would have been useful, however I'm sure they have a good reason for it. I actually welcome the App Store and I have some ideas for Mac-specific apps that would be very difficult to market for the money they would achieve and hopefully this will be a good route to market

It's also a subtle way to get the new age devs to forget about supporting two architectures. It's not so big of a deal with something that's entirely Cocoa, but this would cause a lot of problems with games and anything written with low-level, performance happy functions. I think.

When you make your profits on margin rather than market share I guess you can afford to leave older versions behind.

It's not brave, it just makes business sense and is a dick move. The OS you're running is just as good as the one you were running before. The applications you were running before are just as good as they are now.

Regarding OS X version: how do you go about upgrading OS X? I am a new Mac user.

I was given a free 2008 MacBook 13" in colledge. It came with Mac OS 10.5.2 installed, which couldn't run some new programs, so I did an update and it updated to 10.5.8 which solved all my problems so far. Are you supposed do buy an OS upgrade? Or buy a new Mac?

You can buy a Snow Leopard DVD for $30, or get downloadable dmgs if you pay for the Mac dev program. Snow Leopard works on any intel Mac.

Upgrades are easy and preserve all your stuff. No need to format or anything.

Of course you can buy a new Mac too.

Just to clarify, Snow Leopard is OS 10.6.

Along the same lines, I wonder how the app store handles this. As a comparison, Firefox disables add-ons that don't work after an update.

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