Without a doubt, Microsoft wins on backward compatibility. I was running a circa-2006 Firewire audio device on Windows 10 in 2021 using drivers that had not bee

Without a doubt, Microsoft wins on backward compatibility. I was running a circa-2006 Firewire audio device on Windows 10 in 2021 using drivers that had not been updated since 2012. I had a Dell Laptop that, when I bought it in 2006, had Windows XP on it. I was able to upgrade it all the way to Windows 10, at no charge. (The beta versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8 both just kind of rolled over into full fledged versions of the OS. Now, even by the time I had Win8 on that machine, it was just for fun. I mostly kept it around because the screen resolution was unusually high for 2006, and for a period afterward, laptop screen resolutions were almost all lower than WXGA+ even on higher end machines. But you could run Windows 10 and modern browsers on a machine built for the WinXP era. Also, I think I paid $700 for that machine, from the Dell Outlet. That's a lot of mileage for the price paid. So when Windows 10 told me that my 12-year-old Ship of Theseus Dell XPS desktop was unable to take an upgrade to Windows 11, I took a long hard look, and sprung for an M1 Macbook w/ 64gb of RAM. They had a pretty killer deal on these at B&H, and it's the first time I've ever felt like I've had a true "desktop replacement" laptop. I still think Explorer is better than Finder (and I'm not going to argue with anyone about why so don't bother asking), there are things I will miss about having an ATX case, but Apple's abdication on proprietary ports is ultimately what pushed me over the edge. Everything is USB-C. Great! I had gotten a lot of mileage out of Firewire hardware, but I saw this as a pivotal moment to use some of that money I'd saved over the last decade and a half to completely modernize my setup. If Windows 11 hadn't forced me to consider new core hardware (and if Apple silicon hadn't leapfrogged everything else on the market - using a laptop all day without charging? Phenomenal.) I'd still be using Windows. I've been using MS operating systems since DOS 3.1, I just have to assume I'm no longer their target market.