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Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

He is evidently NOT opposed to changes, read these quotes from him:

> I don't like change when it unnecessarily breaks things that used to work just fine.

> I used to like change more when it actually made me work better, when the advantages clearly outweighed the downsides, when progress and improvements were noticeable and thoughtfully implemented.

He is opposed to changes that 1) break things that used to work fine, 2) do not make him work better, and so on, you get the idea. If those changes make him work better, or when the advantages clearly outweigh the downsides, and when improvements are noticeable and thoughtfully implemented, then he is all in favor of those changes, i.e. not opposed to changes in general, just some changes that do not meet some criteria.

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> He is opposed to changes that 1) break things that used to work fine

The arguments for building emulators into the OS are weak. A minority of users running old operating systems in VMs while the majority get a sleeker, better maintained and thus hopefully more secure OS. That is a fair tradeoff.

Pulling native 32-bit support may be 2019’s laptop-with-no-disk-drive drama.

People who've been using an OS for a fairly long time tend to accumulate applications. Many of them will have been 32-bit at the point they got them. Many of them still will be, or will be fairly awkward to update. While I'm happy I should be able to find 64 bit versions of everything I want to upgrade, I'm confident I wouldn't be able to talk my mother through it on the phone.

It's been flagged that it's coming for a while, but _at best_ it's a massive ballache for an awful lot of customers. Apple are going to need to provide me with a pretty compelling reason to persuade me to willingly undergo that pain ...

> I don't like change when it unnecessarily breaks things that used to work just fine.

This is by definition what change is. It's an improvement, and if changes didn't break things there'd never be progress and nothing would get changed.

Change is absolutely not, "by definition", an improvement. It can be. And it can be entirely the opposite.

What I meant is that an improvement is always a change. It may not have worked for a specific person but it was intended to address an issue for others.

Backwards compatibility does not come for free. At some point people refusing to use new features have to be cut off.

Perhaps, but they don't have to like it.

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