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I read this all the time but I don't buy it. Hiring some maintenance programmers to take care of 10.6 or 10.7 security for X more years (and announcing that EO

I read this all the time but I don't buy it. Hiring some maintenance programmers to take care of 10.6 or 10.7 security for X more years (and announcing that EOL date!) sounds pretty harmless. How would that hold Apple back at all? They have mountains of cash in the bank and those programmers wouldn't get into the way of 10.8 or 10.9 at all.

bestes 14y ago
That is the brute-force approach Microsoft uses. Corporations love it. I find the problem is that the "matrix" of possibilities you have to keep in mind as a programmer keeps getting bigger and bigger. You end up with the Adobe Flash effect (least common denominator) within your own OS or program or whatever. I would call that a very high price indeed.
philwelch 14y ago
If you can hire qualified systems programmers, you can put them to much more productive use than maintaining Mac OS 10.6 for another decade.
saturdaysaint 14y ago
Security patches, while not trivial or cheap, are vastly simpler than either the backward compatibility problems I described or the issue at hand with incompatible video drivers. You can't just add programmers to mate cutting edge OS kernel features (ie leveraging recent videocards) with old hardware. None of us can speak authoritatively on the case in point, but it seems painfully optimistic to think you can pull this off without introducing a lot of complexity. And then, what happens if the 10.8 team tweaks the kernel during a point update? Yep, better double or triple the testing team. "Oh, it looks like it'll take some work to get 10.8 working with all of our old AMD chipsets - either we delay release until fall (after Windows 8, unfortunately) or we put some of our "A" engineers on it." Complexity is the keyword. Complexity and mediocrity go hand in hand. Backward compatibility is a noble goal in many ways, but every generation back of software/hardware you try to maintain exponentially increases the complexity you deal with instead of putting a better new product in user's hands.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  I was only thinking of security updates, new features can often be added by third parties and that leads to a healthy market that will fill the gaps on older OS versions. HN completely ignores the class of computer users who only need Safari, Mail and some variation of Word, and then live in these apps for years without any major upgrade. In my experience, these people don't even feel entitled to any upgrade and they don't add any complexity to any testing matrix. All they need are baseline security updates, and existing services better don't stop without a plausible reason (see MobileMe). I'm not thinking of MegaCorp here, but rather my own and friends' close relatives. The machine that got excluded from 10.8 after only 4 years was not a rev-A MacBook Air in the hands of some early adopters but a Mac Mini, the most traditional Mac money can buy. That really leaves little hope that all my "slow adopter" relatives will ever leave the Windowsverse.

bestes 14y ago

That is the brute-force approach Microsoft uses. Corporations love it. I find the problem is that the "matrix" of possibilities you have to keep in mind as a programmer keeps getting bigger and bigger. You end up with the Adobe Flash effect (least common denominator) within your own OS or program or whatever. I would call that a very high price indeed.

philwelch 14y ago

If you can hire qualified systems programmers, you can put them to much more productive use than maintaining Mac OS 10.6 for another decade.

saturdaysaint 14y ago

Security patches, while not trivial or cheap, are vastly simpler than either the backward compatibility problems I described or the issue at hand with incompatible video drivers. You can't just add programmers to mate cutting edge OS kernel features (ie leveraging recent videocards) with old hardware. None of us can speak authoritatively on the case in point, but it seems painfully optimistic to think you can pull this off without introducing a lot of complexity. And then, what happens if the 10.8 team tweaks the kernel during a point update? Yep, better double or triple the testing team. "Oh, it looks like it'll take some work to get 10.8 working with all of our old AMD chipsets - either we delay release until fall (after Windows 8, unfortunately) or we put some of our "A" engineers on it." Complexity is the keyword. Complexity and mediocrity go hand in hand. Backward compatibility is a noble goal in many ways, but every generation back of software/hardware you try to maintain exponentially increases the complexity you deal with instead of putting a better new product in user's hands.

gurkendoktor 14y ago
I was only thinking of security updates, new features can often be added by third parties and that leads to a healthy market that will fill the gaps on older OS versions. HN completely ignores the class of computer users who only need Safari, Mail and some variation of Word, and then live in these apps for years without any major upgrade. In my experience, these people don't even feel entitled to any upgrade and they don't add any complexity to any testing matrix. All they need are baseline security updates, and existing services better don't stop without a plausible reason (see MobileMe). I'm not thinking of MegaCorp here, but rather my own and friends' close relatives. The machine that got excluded from 10.8 after only 4 years was not a rev-A MacBook Air in the hands of some early adopters but a Mac Mini, the most traditional Mac money can buy. That really leaves little hope that all my "slow adopter" relatives will ever leave the Windowsverse.