Microsoft was selling software and needed that software to work. Making it work in as much hardware as possible was a good thing.
Apple was selling hardware and needed customers to upgrade that hardware over time.
Microsoft sells hardware now too, and cares more about the cloud. So, they are not so much about deep compatibility anymore.
Mac and macOS are afterthoughts at this point.
Especially nowadays it seems their biggest asset became that they produce good PC-hardware on such a high economics of scale that they're almost unreachable in build-quality...
I’m not so sure. We love to complain about Apple, but I don’t see many old timer Mac users now extolling the virtues of Windows. It’s dangerous extrapolating one’s own observations to the world at large, so maybe I’m wrong?
This might be true, but macOS in general is not what made Apple one of the largest companies on the planet.
That's not about complaining, it's about correlation and causation. It's like saying Apple's Wi-Fi routers must be the best because Apple became one of the largest companies on the planet.
I'd say without the iOS ecosystem they would be a well-respected company in the premium tier of their industry, like Dyson or B&O.
At some point you need to move on. Can’t support ancient platforms forever.
I switched to mac circa 2003 and reliably connecting to wifi was simple, clean, and intuitive. This was the height of the shitshow that was wireless networking on windows, where half the time windows would fight with the vendor software, etc.
I was even more shocked when I hit the "advanced" button and there was full and working advanced BSD networking settings cleanly laid out, from overriding IP/netmask/router, 802.1X, etc. Windows made it difficult and frustrating to apply these kinds of settings, because they wanted to hide it from the user.
So little? macOS Sequoia is compatible with Macs that are over seven years old [1], macOS Sonoma goes back to 2017 [2].
At that point, it doesn't make much sense for anyone to still be operating these things in a production setting because of power efficiency and lack of RAM - and all Intel macOS machines can be used with even the most cutting-edge Linux distributions anyway if you wish to further extend their service life. If you need a modern Windows though, you'll most likely want to go via a hypervisor because of TPM concerns.
The old PPC clankers, it's a miracle the hardware is still running and they haven't died from bad capacitors, Soldergate or whatever in the time.
And Apple has poor backwards compatibility. You can't run 32-bit Intel binaries on anything newer than 10.14. PPC has been out of the question for over 15 years. Meanwhile even on Windows on Arm you can run stuff made with XP or even Windows 98 in mind.
... assuming they have TPM 2.0, which is far from a given.
> And Apple has poor backwards compatibility. You can't run 32-bit Intel binaries on anything newer than 10.14.
Fair point. Apple is indeed more aggressive on backwards compatibility in software... which is both a blessing and a curse. At the very least, it forces app developers to stay at least somewhat current, which means that Apple has far less legacy garbage to drag around - unlike Windows, where Microsoft went through at least half a dozen completely different programming frameworks and paradigms alone relating to "how to draw a window on the screen" which it has to support to this day simply because otherwise the complaints would be endless. And Linux is even worse in that regard.
> PPC has been out of the question for over 15 years. Meanwhile even on Windows on Arm you can run stuff made with XP or even Windows 98 in mind.
If you really have such old software and a need for it... run it on a VM.
Software devs come and go, there's no guarantee the dev will go back and update old software. Just look at the graveyard of abandoned Mac games on Steam. And even if they do, it often means rebuying or worse a subscription just for the sake of running what you already had.
Can I run something like Crysis in VM with good performance? Especially on a completely different architecture like ARM?
It was specially clear in the early days of MS-DOS versus Mac OS.
Hear, hear!
Outside the corporate world's devices, I insist that my personal computing choices bring me either high confidence or personally useful knowledge/growth, or I will ban the product/company with malice. I banned APPL for foisting the full load of supporting older devices onto me, and MSFT Windows 11 is facing my personal banishment for kicking all older (but perfectly serviceable) hardware to the curb.
I thank the Linux ecosystem every single day.
I'm also seeing more software lately talking about dropping support for Windows 7 or 8 after a certain release.
It supports x86 emulation, for now.
I believe Windows has seen more architectures than Mac OS Classic and OS X combined.
Windows 3rd party software often drops support because Microsoft doesn't support the OS. It could be the desire to use new APIs that aren't included in 7/8 (or soon to be 10), but it's hard to support an operating system as an app vendor that the OS vendor doesn't support.
I always liked VMware's statement that they would support NT4 and above -- like, no you can't.
I have never been a Windows user, but I used to keep an eye on it when NT was still the separate business version (pre-Vista) and my NT 4.0 (or was it 3.51?) CD-ROM had x86, MIPS, Alpha and maybe PowerPC support. When things weren’t as clear platform-wise, NT was really a multi-platform system. Since then also x86_64, IA64, ARM64.
The same applies to Windows and Apple's OS.
The point about the command line is that it is there for people who want it. You can use all of them without using the command line.