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Yes and Microsoft has constantly paid the cost by not being able to move as fast and having security issues because of some long forgotten piece of legacy code.
by scarface74 4y ago
Yes and Microsoft has constantly paid the cost by not being able to move as fast and having security issues because of some long forgotten piece of legacy code. Apple was able to have basically the same core OS run on phones, tablets, watches, set top boxes and monitors (yes the latest Apple display runs a version of iOS on an iPhone 11 era chip with 64GB RAM).
Back as early as 2005 there were more than half a dozen ways to represent a “string” in C on Microsoft platforms depending on which API you were using.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/text/how-to-convert-between-various-string-types https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/text/how-to-convert-bet...
Of course this led to an early easily exploitable security issue in Windows where all you had to do was encode a DOS command and put in the url for the browser and you could run any DOS command with admin privileges on a web server running IIS.
- kennend3 4y agoSpeaking of security.. tell us, what is involved in "jailbreaking" an iphone? you take some action, and get "root" access to the OS which allows things like bypassing the anti-theft mechanism? Do you remember the days when all you had to do was go to a website and now your iphone was "rooted" Microsoft should have done more to limit "backwards compatibility" as it has stung them over and over again. Apple has a tendency of intentionally breaking things (sorry, your mac isn't supported on this version of MacOS. Apply a very small patch is suddenly is supported?). Pretending that Microsofts legacy support created security issues while Apple doesn't have security problems on its own is misleading.
- scarface74 4y agoI never said that Apple didn’t have any security issues. But by definition if you have a smaller attack area, you have less chances of security vulnerabilities. You don’t have to worry about an old forgotten part of the code that was just there to support 32 big apps from iOS 1 have lingering bugs.
- amelius 4y ago> and having security issues Security fixes should always be backported, because there will always be people stuck at a version of the OS for one reason or the other (it is guaranteed if you serve millions of people). Blaming users for not upgrading, or forcing developers to upgrade is NOT how it should be done.
- scarface74 4y agoSo should Apple have kept compatibility with 32 bit apps? PPC apps? 68K apps? Apple does release security fixes and released one for the 2012 circa iPhone 5S last September. But once it dropped support for all 32 bit apps, it didn’t have to carry it forward to new Macs and was able to remove support from the processor itself.
- amelius 4y agoWhy not? Given Apple's growth, they can hire a person for every release of their OS and keep them working on backports of security issues without problems.
- scarface74 4y agoEvery piece of code you have to maintain is technical debt and increases the surface area of bugs and vulnerabilities. There is no hardware support for 32 bit apps in the newest ARM chips. Should they also ship both a 68K, PPC, and 32 bit capable x86 VM with Macs? Why stop at software compatibility, why shouldn’t modern MacBooks come with SCSI and ADB ports? Why shouldn’t Apple desktop computers still support Nubus?
- amelius 4y agoWe were talking about security updates.
- scarface74 4y agoSo should they update MacTCP for System 7 for my old 68K Mac LC II? They already provide updates for phones and iPads back to 2013 as recently as last month. That was the first phone that supported LTE. Any phone older than that will soon be inoperable as the carriers shut down their 3G network.