or maybe they could have just said, 32-bit programs will be slower... Technical debt is when people make a mess, its perfectly possible to clean that mess with

or maybe they could have just said, 32-bit programs will be slower... Technical debt is when people make a mess, its perfectly possible to clean that mess without breaking ABIs. Particularly in OS's where the ABIs tend to be decoupled from the underlying code by abstraction layers. For example you can swap the filesystem in use and still maintain the behavior. Linux's syscall ABI has been basically static for decades, its only the userspace layers that don't try and adhear to those levels of compatibility. PS: We like to give apple all this credit for having a "fast" machine, but the real question should be, if it can't solve the problem I have, does it matter how fast it is? Mac's for the vast majority of the people I see using them are basically trendy chromebooks, where the users are spending 99% of their time in safari. So its probably a good choice for apple if that is the user base they are interested in.