Frankly I don't think that's fair to Windows. There would be a shitstorm of epic proportions if Microsoft unilaterally broke compatibility with thousands and thousands of programs, tools and workflows like Big Sur has done.
Big Sur has been out for 3 months now and the company I work for, like many others, has a blanket ban on upgrading to it because of mountains of compatibility problems with mission-critical software.
Windows is the perfect platform for us because it makes our applications so much less expensive to develop. We are a profitable company with hundreds of B2B customers and thousands of users that deploy on their own hardware and we can deliver our software without Docker or anything because the application just runs on any Windows version since XP. It's basically write and forget (apart from a few hickups here and there when Windows Update accidentally breakes something).
We have been working for years to replace parts of the VB6 application with modern .NET libraries and while this is unsupported by Microsoft, it's still working. The VB application hosts the modern .NET libraries and integrates its functionalities and new functionality is exclusively developed in .NET. Our development speed is not impacted by deprecated APIs that we have to urgently address. We can take our time to improve things without our customers noticing.
If we were supporting macOS, we would have shut down a long time ago. It would've been impossible for us to keep up with yearly macOS API changes and to add new features at the same time.
This isn’t even nation state level attacks, it’s pretty standard behavior for botnets and ransomware.
Extra malicious hosts are never great but this isn't exactly a dealbreaker.
It's not a part of Windows itself per se, but a runtime environment. Couldn't you just as well have written an app in Java, which has also kept good backwards compatibility and could still be run on both Windows and MacOS with minimal changes?
If there were a version of Visual Basic for Mac released alongside the Windows version back in 1998, it would have been a classic Mac app which Apple dropped support for after Mac OS 10.4 and never had on Intel-based Macs.
If Microsoft had updated this theoretical Visual Basic for Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X back in 2008, Apple would have dropped support for it with Catalina, which ditched 32-bit app support.
What you're hoping for just wouldn't have worked except for a runtime that was still being supported by the publisher to make the jump from Mac Classic to OS X and then again from 32-bit to 64-bit as Apple broke backwards compatibility.
If Microsoft had somehow brought Mac VB out of retirement twice and done both of the above, Apple would be dropping support for it again a few years from now when they drop Rosetta and only support M1-based apps on Mac OS.
However until then, UWP apps will keep running.
While dropping support for VB would have had negative consequences and using Java may have been better, we only know that in hindsight. Java was about half the age of VB at that point in time, it's most vocal advocates seemed to be more interested in cutting Microsoft down to size, while it had a mixed reception among both developers and end users. None of those qualities bode well in the long term, especially from the perspective of those invested in Microsoft technologies.
It will still run on anything from XP to Windows 10.
I manage hundreds of Macs and the users are constantly howling about not being able to use Big Sur yet. I can explain there are still many dealbreaking bugs (the 11.2 upgrade space problem caused major headaches taking hours to fix in my testing!), it's slower and more screenspace wasteful but they keep wanting it because of Apple's snazzy PR. There's also a major issue with AD accounts getting completely blocked after the upgrade.
Of course what doesn't help is that new Macs come with Big Sur by default and can't really be downgraded. So we have to support it at least for new machines.
They force you to use it to develop any app for iOS and macOS - it's a significant financial investment to get there ( you need a mac, a developer account), if you had to pay for Xcode as well... ( to be fair, you probably pay for it in a way with the developer account)
I have being a Mac user since Apple II. All these changes really saddens me. Can we start some kind group similar to class action law suit to pressure Apple into changing this kind of behaviour in Big Sur. If not enough people upgrade, maybe they will have skip a version and come out with something more light weight. I think that happened with Snow Leopard ( don't remember the exact one).
Along with many others it seems, Catalina is the last version of macOS I'll be using.
I have a 2013 27" iMac and as of mid-last year I was considering buying a new one sometime in 2021, but I've now changed my mind, due to decisions Apple has made about how they handle their desktop operating system.
Apple doesn't care about a group but they do care about money. So do like many of us and stop giving them your money. It's all we can really do.
Sorry for the confusion!
Been on Apple desktops ever since. But the decline in the last several years has been sharp and no longer tolerable to me. I'm still on a Mac dekstop but I'm on 10.11 and will never upgrade. As OSX becomes closer and closer to an iOS-style user-hostile walled garden, I'm not interested. It'll be back to a Linux (maybe, BSD) desktop after this machine no longer works.