Comment by miffy900 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miffy900 | Hacker News Reader

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To be fair, Microsoft has always had a culture of strong backwards compatibility, even between major OS versions - this is something they cultivate internally AND also tell their customers/users about.

Apple has had no such culture internally and they sure as heck don't emphasise backward compatibility to their customers (users or otherwise) - if anything, Apple prods and nags their developers to stick to the latest SDK/platform APIs, and shove the burden of software compatibility and maintenance onto them and hand wave away the breaking changes as being part and parcel of membership in the Apple ecosystem. This attitude can be traced back to the Steve Jobs era at Apple. It's definitely not new and comparing what Microsoft does with software and backward compatibility and expecting Apple to do the same is not fair - they really are different companies.

It's been this way forever, and consistently that's been my annoyance with Apple. If I weren't a coder or hobbyist musician or filmmaker, there's no way I would've wanted a Mac in the 2000s because it failed its main job of running software. If I were grown up back then with a desk job, it's probably involve a Windows PC.

Web partially fixed this, but only by accident, because Apple isn't for the web. And if I cared at all about video games or were doing certain fields of work (maybe creative tools now that Apple even lost that hegemony), that'd take me off the Mac. Somehow the Mac 3P software scene is even worse now than in the PPC era. And Microsoft is now testing just how annoying Windows can be without people leaving, answer is a lot.

Apple is limiting their reach so much, for reasons I still can't rationalize. Some basic level of backwards compatibility or at least more stable APIs should be possible without sacrificing the good things. I've done some iPhone and Mac dev too, it sucks in every possible way, and I get why people trust it so little that they'd rather shoehorn a web app into a native shell.

How is Apple limiting its reach? It doesn’t want to compete with the bottom of the barrel low end PC sales and for the most part people with money are already buying Macs unless they are gamers. Apple routinely captures around 50% of PC revenue

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