Why does Microsoft dominate the enterprise and not Google? I think the above has almost everything to do with it.
Apple has kind of walked the middle road between Microsoft's extreme backward compatibility and Google's "kill off everything that doesn't earn at least a billion". They support old hardware a lot longer than Google, but they also break a lot of things with their OS updates. Apple also has a pretty legendary track record of successfully shifting CPU architectures without breaking popular apps at the time, something that's pretty much unheard of elsewhere.
Which other SW/HW companies have switched CPU architecture? I am not sure there is a point of comparison here, and there has only been 1 case so far, the M1 is upcoming and we don't know yet how well that will work.
Linux works pretty well with client qemu specified as the architecture handler for non-native binaries too :)
I also said 'architecture change' so by your count that would be 2. But Rosetta was only for PowerPC to x86 wasn't it? There seems to have been emulation for the 68x chips but was it seamless without breaking anything?
I mean any company could change architecture but rely on a customer using an emulator that isn't really not breaking things.
So by my count, 1, but if I am wrong and the 68x translation was equally as seamless and breakless than 2.
But to say it was unheard of you need to reference all the other companies that transitioned architecture and broke stuff. I can't think of another general computing supplier who did that but I might be wrong - can you give an example?
There's also Palm, which successfully switched from Motorola 68000 to ARM, without breaking popular apps at the time.
To me while it's nice, it's not an impossible achievement and often likely uses somebody else's code to get there :)
I think apple receive far too much praise for things they've done which are often not as amazing as they seem and too little praise for other things (e.g. their great work on the 5nm SoC hw) as well as far too little criticism for biz practices.
Trying to set things a little more on an even keel :)
By the way my HP laptop from 2014 did well with every single Ubuntu LTS from 12.04 (I bought at the beginning of the year) to 20.04.
Learned a hard lesson that day.
By the way, did you ever recover the laptop or your data?
This is the first time I've heard that, and I've never experienced it. If you have a compilation of "driver support disappears" issues, I'd like to read it.
It's very common for folks to be using 5- and 6-year-old Macs with a recent version of macOS. macOS Big Sur supports 7-year-old Macs.
I've done Mac IT for a long time and I've never seen this be the case.
To be honest, I've experienced this a ton of times with Windows, where the only driver available was for an older version of Windows and not the one the customer has.
I have a nearly 10-year old iMac and I never experienced what you're talking about.
Apple has warned developers for several years that support for 32-bit apps (for example) was going away. Same thing with kernel extensions.