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Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

There's always a person who is happy to explain how Apple bests any competitor you could mention at any metric you could imagine.

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So if Apple kept “25 years” of backwards compatibility, should they have been better off bundling a 68K and PPC emulator? Why stop there? They should have kept compatibility with the Apple //e and also bundled a 68K emulator?

Someone else was complaining that they didn’t keep FireWire. Should modern Macs come with ADB ports?

Obviously not, but that doesn't prove that there isn't value to having backwards compatibility. Sometimes you just want something to run and not have to touch or change it for a long time.

A 20-year old machine that's critical to a factory can run off a serial cable plugged in to an expansion card running software written in the 90's that will still run on Windows 10. Nobody in their right mind would decide to write that same software on a Mac.

Well, given where all of the PC manufacturers are that were around in 1990 compared to the revenue and profit of just the Mac division, it seems like Apple didn’t make a bad business decision not prioritizing backwards compatibility.

If you compare where Apple is and where Microsoft is also, it doesn’t seem like chasing enterprise PC sales was as good of a long term bet as going after the consumer market....

I have a Windows 10 PC with a PCI (not express) slot that I installed a Firewire card in last year to use 15 year old software still available from Sony's website to rip a stack of Digital8 home movies.

And Apple has sold a Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter for years.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD464LL/A/apple-thunderbo...

I tackled that project about two years ago. Asked around and a friend had an old laptop with FW port, so I installed Ubuntu on it and copied all my old Video8 and Digital8 Tapes.

> So if Apple kept “25 years” of backwards compatibility, should they have been better off bundling a 68K and PPC emulator? Why stop there? They should have kept compatibility with the Apple //e and also bundled a 68K emulator?

I don't think it's unreasonable that Apple hasn't done so, but neither do I think doing so would be unreasonable. Archive.org can emulate Apple II's in your browser, I'm sure Apple could add an equivalent feature to MacOS if that were something they cared to do. They obviously don't, and that's their prerogative.

That is fair, though, because it is equally likely to find someone that will never give Apple credit for a single thing.

In the face of what Apple does for privacy, comparatively, nobody else doing a damn thing. Privacy is by a very significant margin the most important metric.

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