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Comment by GrandMasterBirt | Hacker News Reader

Because vista's drivers were not solid during release.

Bsods killed it

High spec requirements killed it

People selling pcs with less than 2 gigs of ram killed it

And the gains the user got were overshadowed by shitty performance, bsods, and the software they need not working. Not to mention the whole upgrade to a priucier version to get the nice ui feature you want.

Also the netbooks can't handle vista so that entire market died.

Also harder to priate = noone using it at home = not evangelizing at work :P

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Interestingly, Apple handles all these problems (save the last one) by having full control of the hardware. This is one of the reasons why Apple OSX comes off as much more stable. MS needs to design an OS that can work with everything. It's inherently easier to design an operating system where there is a small(er) set of variations. Whether this is the right way to go over the long haul is yet to be determined.

This is why I switched back to Mac when OS X came out (after the IE6 beta trashed my HD, and I didn't have a floppy of CD-Rom driver, so I had to reinstall Win95 from 18 floppy disks, ugh). Yes, I pay a premium for hardware, and yes, Apple abandons my old hardware in 3-4 years, and selection of hardware and software is not what it is in the Windows world.

However in exchange for that, I get real progress in the software, and when something inevitable go wrong, chances are someone else has had the problem because there's such a limited range of configuration options. As a professional developer it's pretty easy to justify the Apple tax on that basis alone.

Actually, Apple has a good track record of supporting old hardware for years.

They just ended that record with the Snow Leopard/Intel requirement, but that seems like a reasonable thing to do.

And your old PPC hardware runs fine with 10.5.

It's not terrible, but it's nowhere near as good as Microsoft. This is just my impression after owning lots of Apple hardware since 1985... I got left out in the cold a lot.

Any tips on installing Vista on my Alpha?

> It's inherently easier to design an operating system where there is a small(er) set of variations.

It's not quite that simple. I spend a fair amount of time writing OSX drivers for, erm, non-Jobsian hardware. With a little hackery (not even programming-level hackery these days), OSX can be remarkably stable on a wide range of system configurations.

Specifically, Apple seems to ship (and test?) drivers for a good deal more hardware than you'd expect. Point example: the 8800GT card that they ship with the Mac Pro--the driver actually works on any 8x00* card, as long as you can disable the check. The GMA950 driver works on a wide range of Intel cards. The ATL1e driver works on a lot of Atheros chipsets. AppleHDA works on a lot of sound cards (If your motherboard has an Intel chipset, it probably works with minimal hackery). Similar to the way Linux drivers work, OSX drivers tend to cover lots of similar hardware. So AppleHDA might replace 100 separate windows drivers for separate sound cards, and the big ones even do several chipset companies.

Lots of the hardware work (some of which makes it into mainline OSX) is done by the Darwin people. I've seen tons of straight-up ports from Linux (SpeedStep for non-Core2Duo processors, for example). There are lots more.

All of that to say, the OSX hardware landscape is far beyond the four-at-a-time macs that Apple actually ships. With respect to driver support, OSX isn't far behind Linux. I'd put OSX's superior reliability as a consequence of their architecture decisions rather than their (purportedly-lack-of) hardware support.

The real sunk cost with hardware support isn't driver development, (paying 4 grad students $400k) but paying people to answer the phones and troubleshoot the devices, paying FedEx to ship the things around, EETs to diagnose and desolder, somebody to write the technical documentation, Geniuses to take tests on the part numbers, etc. Guarantee Apple tests lots of hardware they never end up shipping because it can't clear the reliability hurdles; all those things need drivers.

If Apple takes it upon themselves to write/test drivers VS relying only on the manufactures to do it, then you are sure that since apple has a stake in it, they will test it well. This is a consequence of controlling what hardware goes into your computer. If you want to plug your soundcard into a mac, better get in touch with apple. Since they know about all the sound drivers, video drivers, etc, they can group where necessary. Being *nix based also gives benefits of having open source drivers.

In any case how many different drivers are out there for Windows Sound? How many are out there for Linux? Bash ALSA or OSS all you want, but they support a ton of hardware, port that sort of support to windows or mac and you got yourself ONE driver heavily tested by freaken' everyone which makes debugging easier with a central point of service.

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