Confirmed: Mountain Lion sends some 64-bit Macs gently into that good night

Correction: most native English speakers :). I for one didn't.

Optimus L3 was released earlier this year, ships with 2.3 with no foreseeable upgrade path (thanks to its low price). The software is outdated the moment it was released.

I'm looking for Android phone today and still undecided of what to get (inclined to get HTC One X) because I'm unsure whether it will get a 4.1 update or not.

You can't just add programmers to mate cutting edge OS kernel features (ie leveraging recent videocards) with old hardware. None of us can speak authoritatively on the case in point, but it seems painfully optimistic to think you can pull this off without introducing a lot of complexity. And then, what happens if the 10.8 team tweaks the kernel during a point update? Yep, better double or triple the testing team.

"Oh, it looks like it'll take some work to get 10.8 working with all of our old AMD chipsets - either we delay release until fall (after Windows 8, unfortunately) or we put some of our "A" engineers on it."

Complexity is the keyword. Complexity and mediocrity go hand in hand. Backward compatibility is a noble goal in many ways, but every generation back of software/hardware you try to maintain exponentially increases the complexity you deal with instead of putting a better new product in user's hands.

I work with people who work with lab software which is happily running OS X 10.2 Jaguar. It's no different than the XP box in the corner, as long as everyone understands that the checkbook has to come out when it breaks.

On the other hand, the quarter million dollar cytometer is going to be running Windows NT 4 Embedded, and when that ATA-66 hard drive fails or the software becomes unable to talk properly with the modern world anymore, it's on the vendor to make it work again. The support typically blows, but it's their problem to handle and none of them are going to be relying on Apple's memory-hole platform.

As long as Lion gets security updates (2 years, minimum), there's absolutely no need for an upgrade. After that, you can just disconnect it from the Internet and use an stronger password.

I completely agree and that's a very valid scenario. Apple tactical advantage is that consumers have completely different usage patterns and expectations than the enterprise/lab (which Apple essentially ignores). If %95 of consumers either (a) upgrade within five years or (b) are completely perplexed by the notion of updating their operating system at all, then Apple are at a huge efficiency advantage EOL-ing technologies around the five year mark. As opposed to having top engineers work on maintaining compatibility with deprecated APIs, old hardware, etc. for 15 year old software.

- silent DVD-ROM read errors causing perma-botched upgrades, even though everything should be CRCed and nothing throws any errors at any point along the way

- pathologically long install stall-outs (40 minutes+)

- pathologically slow performance at first restart, usually on older RAM-constrained machines trying to re-thumbnail everything

- Significant keychain issues requiring creation of an entirely new keychain

- Spotlight issues requiring a first or second re-index

- Mail.app upgrades are quite problematic, especially when moving to V2 layout or accessing previously configured accounts

- Now-missing JVMs causing significant problems during first boot

- Lion download progress bars blowing some internal math and going for that 235905329052 gigabyte

The biggest hassle I think is exploding third-party software at first logon. Things like garbage rinter+scanner managers freaking out because drivers got moved around underneath them cause a flurry of popups that frustrate techs and freak out novices.