5 ms·

Apple's model customer is one who upgrades often. If you want solid support for old products, stick with Microsoft, and accept that their products can be clunk

Apple's model customer is one who upgrades often. If you want solid support for old products, stick with Microsoft, and accept that their products can be clunkier because of deliberate choices to maintain backwards-compatibility.

e40 12y ago
What about developers that need to support customers on older systems?
- ryanlol 12y ago
  Many don't.
- plorkyeran 12y ago
  You basically need VMs for every version of OS X you want to support, and need to keep copies of the old OS X SDKs since Apple seems not to test that newer ones will continue to work despite superficially supporting choosing a target version. Most developers don't bother, as Apple has successfully made it quite difficult.
matt4077 12y ago
To be fair, OS X updates are free and usually run well even on 5+ years old hardware. OS X has kinda gone the way of Chrome, with most users on the newest version.
- toong 12y ago
  They are now. I remember buying upgrades ?
- JustSomeNobody 12y ago
  To be even more fair, there's been a number of issues with Yosemite that make some of us want to stick with Mavericks. Just because something is free doesn't make it better.
  - gabeio 12y ago
    Just because it's paid doesn't make it better either.
  - thebouv 12y ago
    I'm with you on this; I can't leave Mavericks just yet. Every colleague I have that's moved on has had numerous issues with their machine. And now this crap. Ugh.
    - EC1 12y ago
      What kind of issues? I've literally noticed no differences besides UI.
      - bdcravens 12y ago
        Random bugginess. When I came into office, plugged my machine into TB display (have one at home, so should be no issue), I got nothing but black. Could get a login prompt, and even closing lid kept backlight on. Only solution was a hard reboot.
        EC1 12y ago
        Oh true. I just realized I have the same issue. I connect my macbook to my hengedock which has 3 monitors attached. If I disconnect my macbook and hook up my tv via hdmi, I plug it into my hengedock and my 3rd monitor is just black while plugged into that hdmi port. I always restart it after watching tv and then plugging my monitors to get it to work.
      - PopsiclePete 12y ago
        FWIW, 10.10.0 for me was perfect. 10.10.1 broke my wifi. Anytime the computer woke up from sleep, I'd have to reset the wifi card so it could find my access point. After 10.10.2 came out, I got my second-ever full computer lock-up. I've had the same OS image since 10.5 (migrated and upgraded multiple time, obviously) and this was the second time my computer required a hard reboot. And this was while watching a video in the Steam client. I was in awe. A video forcing me to do a full reboot? Brought back memories of Windows ME. While "upgrading" to 10.10.3, my computer failed to reboot itself. It just sat there, black screen, with a little spinner, for about 2 hours. Hard reboot, everything is back to normal. For now. I fully expect 10.10.4 to actually destroy my hard drive at this point, as well as cause my monitor to spontaneously get 30-40 dead pixels. Sucky part is, I feel I have no alternative. Windows is out of the question after seeing what a factory OEM image comes with nowadays. I'm not giving them money and spending 2 days formatting/reinstalling/seeking out drivers on slow Taiwanese servers just to make a half-usable computer. And then, after all that, spend another 2 days installing various adware infested shitware to get a fricking PDF viewer. And don't get me started on getting a half-decent dev environment going. Ugh. Linux is almost there. It's a crap shoot for me, unless it's running in a VM. I never know which kernel update will fix my trackpad/break my sound/wifi and which will fix the wifi, break suspend, fix sound, but break xrandr or some other archaic XWindows-related technology. So, OS X it is, for the time being.
- osxrand 12y ago
  Indeed, I'm running 10.10 on a 2006 Mac Pro, and it's running really really well (boot.efi replaced to get it working, not supported:). I was surprised just how well it's working tbh.
- sbarre 12y ago
  Maybe most personal users but those of us in larger IT-managed organizations don't always have the luxury of updating on day one (point: I am on 10.9.5 right now).
- greedo 12y ago
  I'm currently running 10.10.3 on a Mac Pro 1,1, at almost 9 years of use. Of course 10.10 isn't supported by Apple, but it works just fine, and with the combination of an SSD and cheap RAM, I imagine I can get another 3-4 years out of this desktop barring a hardware failure that pushes me to a new system.
  - hyc_symas 12y ago
    ... and now that you've posted that, I fully expect a mysterious hardware failure to suddenly manifest....
    - greedo 12y ago
      The good thing is that eBay is flooded with cheap old Mac Pros, so parts won't be hard to come by.
      - 72deluxe 12y ago
        Such beautiful cases too!
- tomswartz07 12y ago
  The OS update might be free, but that's not the only reason that a number of large deployments might stay at a single version. For us IT Shops, its almost exclusively about ensuring support for the hundreds of other software programs. I see a lot of folks arguing otherwise, and I'm not sure they realize this. Sure, it works fine for the 'isolated single user', but it's totally different in a large deployment model.
- tjr 12y ago
  I have a lot of music production software on my Mac, which doesn't all necessarily get updated to work with the latest OS X right away. Upgrading the operating system tends to be a maze of determining what works and what doesn't, possibly including paying for updates of software besides the OS. I generally put off doing a major Mac OS update for as long as possible.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    It's even worse that every update makes you wonder if your FireWire interface and control software will ever work or run again, even though you're running on THE SAME HARDWARE as before; the OS update typically breaks it.
- rcthompson 12y ago
  "Most users on the newest version"? Of the seven or eight Macs at my workplace, my personal Macbook is the only one running the latest OSX.
  - azinman2 12y ago
    Ya the stats I've seen indicate that a considerable chunk are still on 10.6, for example. I forget where but I'm sure a Google search will yield it.
- oxide 12y ago
  sounds like macs are only in homes from your perspective.
- dsjoerg 12y ago
  [citation needed]
  - matt4077 12y ago
    80% on 10.9 or 10.10: http://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/os-x-market-share-statistics-1-in-5-macs-still-unsupported/ http://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/os-x-market-share-st... Only 50% on Windows 7 or 8: https://analytics.usa.gov https://analytics.usa.gov Oh, wait, Windows 7 is from 2009. Only 10% use a Windows younger than two years.
    - barrkel 12y ago
      A large chunk of this is due to business use of Windows. Microsoft would not be able to get away with the shenanigans that Apple are pulling here.
      - s_q_b 12y ago
        Don't worry, my company uses plenty of Macs, and they're plenty upset. As does the U.S. government. I wouldn't count on this "oh, we're just not going to backport the update" sticking around. Unless they want to loose all of their government and commercial sales.
        Alupis 12y ago
        > As does the U.S. government. The government is largely Windows PC's (mostly XP and Win7).
        xenophonf 12y ago
        Alupis, I support federal government scientists (biologists, chemists, entomologists, etc.), and many of them use Macs. Naturally, there are more Windows PCs than there are Macs, but there are plenty of Macs in our labs.
- Alupis 12y ago
  > To be fair, OS X updates are free and usually run well even on 5+ years old hardware Unless your hardware has been made "incompatible" by Apple (not for any technical reason, but simply because they wish you'd buy new hardware).
  - wtallis 12y ago
    What hardware have they dropped support for without a technical reason? To my knowledge, the only Intel Macs they've dropped support for are ones with 32-bit processors, 32-bit firmware (requiring a 32-bit kernel and drivers even if the processor is 64-bit), or really old GPUs that can't support recent versions of OpenGL.
    - cmurf 12y ago
      To my knowledge no Linux distro packages install media supporting 32-bit firmware and 64-bit kernel+CPU, but it's definitely possible to built a 32-bit GRUB EFI binary and have it load and execute a 64-bit kernel on a 64-bit CPU. I've done it on such a Mac. And there are a number of tablets built this way also (unfortunately).
      - wtallis 12y ago
        Intel only contributed the code for that a year ago, so while we now know it can be done, there's no particular reason to believe that it's easy to get working properly. The messy mix of EFI 1.x and UEFI 2.x that Apple uses could make things even trickier.
    - xserve2009 12y ago
      Early 2009 X-Serve? It has a quad-core Xeon processor. [update] I am wrong. It is the late 2008 X-Serve that won't upgrade ... Specs: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP10?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/SP10?locale=en_US Supported H/W: iMac (Mid 2007 or newer) MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer) MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer) MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer) Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer) Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer) Xserve (Early 2009) from https://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/ https://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/
- vacri 12y ago
  usually run well even on 5+ years old hardware At my last office we had older macs, a mix of laptops and desktops. They all ran slow, with one user's mac pro using all 4GB RAM on a fresh boot with nothing loaded. These folks were normal users, not power users. When a new OSX release would come out, a few people would upgrade, have a ton of problems, and warn everyone else. I ran linux myself, and was occasionally called over to help with an OSX problem, and I could never understand how my colleagues could stand to work on such slow computers. In my experience, older macs do not usually run well on newer OSX.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    I recall the same pain with Vista - booting to an empty desktop saw insane RAM usage.
- dguaraglia 12y ago
  <citation needed> on the "run well even on 5+ years old hardware" bit. Sure, the OS will boot and work, but that doesn't mean things will work well. My late 2011 13-in MacBook Pro became unbearably slow after doing a clean upgrade to Mavericks. Only upgrading the memory to 8GB (which was not supported by Apple for that model) fixed the issue. Yosemite works, but looks like crap on anything without a retina display. Newer versions of iOS have a habit of making older phones become sluggish when compared with the same phone model running an older version of iOS. I'm not expecting Microsoft-level backwards compatibility, but as someone that has a somewhat complex development environment having to get everything to work on a new version of the OS can take up to a week of tweaking.
  - MBCook 12y ago
    I'm currently running the latest version of Yosemite. I have a 2010 MacBook Pro 15 inch with eight gigs of RAM and an SSD. I've had little bugs and fiddly bugs with Safari and a few other things, but I really thinks it has worked fine for years and years on the machine. It noticeably improved when they added RAM compression (was that Mavericks?). I don't find the graphics a problem at all, although they do look better on my Retina iMac. I got used to them pretty quickly. I've been happy with most OS updates as they sped Safari up or fixed small bugs in it. Photos for OS X is a MASSIVE speed improvement over iPhoto. I know some people run into pretty catastrophic bugs from time to time, I haven't had that experience personally. The idea that the OS doesn't run well on five-year-old hardware is bunk. I have no need to replace my MacBook Pro, The only thing it's not good at is 3D (and it was never very good at that). If you have enough RAM and replace the spinning disk old Macs feel fantastic with a if you have enough RAM and replace the spinning hard drive old Mac still feel fantastic with a recent OS. If you're on a 5400rpm drive with 2GB I'm sure it's painful. But I know even 4GB machines fair very well. SSDs just make an insanely big difference.
    - 72deluxe 12y ago
      Did you upgrade to an SSD? I have a 2012 MBP non-retina with a slow Toshiba drive in it (it seems it is entirely coincidental whether you'll get a Toshiba or Samsung in your new MacBook!) and I am considering upgrading to an SSD. I use BootCamp (periodic Windows gaming) and have a bunch of large VMs within OSX, so I would be interested in how the upgrade went and where to look, how to clone my disk etc. etc.
driverdan 12y ago
Or LTS versions of Linux.
tsieling 12y ago
> Apple's model customer is one who upgrades often. I don't know any tech company that doesn't have that idea of a model customer :) To their credit, I can run the latest on a pretty old Mac Mini at home. It's not as fast as it used to be, but it is supported long after the form factor of the Mini has undergone big changes. I don't consider myself being squeezed to upgrade.
- s_q_b 12y ago
  I booted up one of those G3 candy colored clamshell iBooks from the early 2000s recently. Not only did start flawlessly, it found and connected to the WiFi, and actually loaded Google on Internet Explorer for Mac.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    Out of interest, did it display the results pages from Google alright? Or was the CSS and JavaScript etc. not recognised? Was it usable, speedwise, as a machine?
    - s_q_b 12y ago
      As a word processor, typing out some code, or as a spreadsheet machine, yes, it was perfectly serviceable. It worked with very little of the modern web, however.
    - s_q_b 12y ago
      To answer your question about Google specifically, yes, it did work fine for search. It wasn't even that slow.
s_q_b 12y ago
Or your IT department could force you to use a Golden Master of 10.9, and not let you update.
n_blom 12y ago
Holy Apple can't be wrong. Microsoft bad bad and clunky. We're talking about a security issue!
gurkendoktor 12y ago
> If you want solid support for old products, stick with Microsoft, and accept that their products can be clunkier because of deliberate choices to maintain backwards-compatibility. It's not only about support for "old" products, it's also about having a roadmap to begin with. It used to be common wisdom that Apple releases major updates for the current version of OS X, and security fixes for the last two versions. Well, that common wisdom is outdated now. Also, backwards compatibility and security fixes are not really the same, and I'd say that the correlation between backwards compatibility and software quality is completely overrated. I know I'd rather trust my life to Windows 7 (the epitome of conservative OS design) than to OS X 10.10 or iOS 8 (speaking as an iOS developer). In raw numbers, 45% of OS X users are now vulnerable (and probably don't even know about it), and Apple doesn't care. That's an insane number. And I thought not patching the ~10% iPhone 4 in the wild was dangerous!

e40 12y ago

What about developers that need to support customers on older systems?

ryanlol 12y ago
Many don't.
plorkyeran 12y ago
You basically need VMs for every version of OS X you want to support, and need to keep copies of the old OS X SDKs since Apple seems not to test that newer ones will continue to work despite superficially supporting choosing a target version. Most developers don't bother, as Apple has successfully made it quite difficult.

matt4077 12y ago

To be fair, OS X updates are free and usually run well even on 5+ years old hardware. OS X has kinda gone the way of Chrome, with most users on the newest version.

toong 12y ago
They are now. I remember buying upgrades ?
JustSomeNobody 12y ago
To be even more fair, there's been a number of issues with Yosemite that make some of us want to stick with Mavericks. Just because something is free doesn't make it better.
- gabeio 12y ago
  Just because it's paid doesn't make it better either.
- thebouv 12y ago
  I'm with you on this; I can't leave Mavericks just yet. Every colleague I have that's moved on has had numerous issues with their machine. And now this crap. Ugh.
  - EC1 12y ago
    What kind of issues? I've literally noticed no differences besides UI.
    - bdcravens 12y ago
      Random bugginess. When I came into office, plugged my machine into TB display (have one at home, so should be no issue), I got nothing but black. Could get a login prompt, and even closing lid kept backlight on. Only solution was a hard reboot.
      - EC1 12y ago
        Oh true. I just realized I have the same issue. I connect my macbook to my hengedock which has 3 monitors attached. If I disconnect my macbook and hook up my tv via hdmi, I plug it into my hengedock and my 3rd monitor is just black while plugged into that hdmi port. I always restart it after watching tv and then plugging my monitors to get it to work.
    - PopsiclePete 12y ago
      FWIW, 10.10.0 for me was perfect. 10.10.1 broke my wifi. Anytime the computer woke up from sleep, I'd have to reset the wifi card so it could find my access point. After 10.10.2 came out, I got my second-ever full computer lock-up. I've had the same OS image since 10.5 (migrated and upgraded multiple time, obviously) and this was the second time my computer required a hard reboot. And this was while watching a video in the Steam client. I was in awe. A video forcing me to do a full reboot? Brought back memories of Windows ME. While "upgrading" to 10.10.3, my computer failed to reboot itself. It just sat there, black screen, with a little spinner, for about 2 hours. Hard reboot, everything is back to normal. For now. I fully expect 10.10.4 to actually destroy my hard drive at this point, as well as cause my monitor to spontaneously get 30-40 dead pixels. Sucky part is, I feel I have no alternative. Windows is out of the question after seeing what a factory OEM image comes with nowadays. I'm not giving them money and spending 2 days formatting/reinstalling/seeking out drivers on slow Taiwanese servers just to make a half-usable computer. And then, after all that, spend another 2 days installing various adware infested shitware to get a fricking PDF viewer. And don't get me started on getting a half-decent dev environment going. Ugh. Linux is almost there. It's a crap shoot for me, unless it's running in a VM. I never know which kernel update will fix my trackpad/break my sound/wifi and which will fix the wifi, break suspend, fix sound, but break xrandr or some other archaic XWindows-related technology. So, OS X it is, for the time being.
osxrand 12y ago
Indeed, I'm running 10.10 on a 2006 Mac Pro, and it's running really really well (boot.efi replaced to get it working, not supported:). I was surprised just how well it's working tbh.
sbarre 12y ago
Maybe most personal users but those of us in larger IT-managed organizations don't always have the luxury of updating on day one (point: I am on 10.9.5 right now).
greedo 12y ago
I'm currently running 10.10.3 on a Mac Pro 1,1, at almost 9 years of use. Of course 10.10 isn't supported by Apple, but it works just fine, and with the combination of an SSD and cheap RAM, I imagine I can get another 3-4 years out of this desktop barring a hardware failure that pushes me to a new system.
- hyc_symas 12y ago
  ... and now that you've posted that, I fully expect a mysterious hardware failure to suddenly manifest....
  - greedo 12y ago
    The good thing is that eBay is flooded with cheap old Mac Pros, so parts won't be hard to come by.
    - 72deluxe 12y ago
      Such beautiful cases too!
tomswartz07 12y ago
The OS update might be free, but that's not the only reason that a number of large deployments might stay at a single version. For us IT Shops, its almost exclusively about ensuring support for the hundreds of other software programs. I see a lot of folks arguing otherwise, and I'm not sure they realize this. Sure, it works fine for the 'isolated single user', but it's totally different in a large deployment model.
tjr 12y ago
I have a lot of music production software on my Mac, which doesn't all necessarily get updated to work with the latest OS X right away. Upgrading the operating system tends to be a maze of determining what works and what doesn't, possibly including paying for updates of software besides the OS. I generally put off doing a major Mac OS update for as long as possible.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  It's even worse that every update makes you wonder if your FireWire interface and control software will ever work or run again, even though you're running on THE SAME HARDWARE as before; the OS update typically breaks it.
rcthompson 12y ago
"Most users on the newest version"? Of the seven or eight Macs at my workplace, my personal Macbook is the only one running the latest OSX.
- azinman2 12y ago
  Ya the stats I've seen indicate that a considerable chunk are still on 10.6, for example. I forget where but I'm sure a Google search will yield it.
oxide 12y ago
sounds like macs are only in homes from your perspective.
dsjoerg 12y ago
[citation needed]
- matt4077 12y ago
  80% on 10.9 or 10.10: http://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/os-x-market-share-statistics-1-in-5-macs-still-unsupported/ http://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/os-x-market-share-st... Only 50% on Windows 7 or 8: https://analytics.usa.gov https://analytics.usa.gov Oh, wait, Windows 7 is from 2009. Only 10% use a Windows younger than two years.
  - barrkel 12y ago
    A large chunk of this is due to business use of Windows. Microsoft would not be able to get away with the shenanigans that Apple are pulling here.
    - s_q_b 12y ago
      Don't worry, my company uses plenty of Macs, and they're plenty upset. As does the U.S. government. I wouldn't count on this "oh, we're just not going to backport the update" sticking around. Unless they want to loose all of their government and commercial sales.
      - Alupis 12y ago
        > As does the U.S. government. The government is largely Windows PC's (mostly XP and Win7).
      - xenophonf 12y ago
        Alupis, I support federal government scientists (biologists, chemists, entomologists, etc.), and many of them use Macs. Naturally, there are more Windows PCs than there are Macs, but there are plenty of Macs in our labs.
Alupis 12y ago
> To be fair, OS X updates are free and usually run well even on 5+ years old hardware Unless your hardware has been made "incompatible" by Apple (not for any technical reason, but simply because they wish you'd buy new hardware).
- wtallis 12y ago
  What hardware have they dropped support for without a technical reason? To my knowledge, the only Intel Macs they've dropped support for are ones with 32-bit processors, 32-bit firmware (requiring a 32-bit kernel and drivers even if the processor is 64-bit), or really old GPUs that can't support recent versions of OpenGL.
  - cmurf 12y ago
    To my knowledge no Linux distro packages install media supporting 32-bit firmware and 64-bit kernel+CPU, but it's definitely possible to built a 32-bit GRUB EFI binary and have it load and execute a 64-bit kernel on a 64-bit CPU. I've done it on such a Mac. And there are a number of tablets built this way also (unfortunately).
    - wtallis 12y ago
      Intel only contributed the code for that a year ago, so while we now know it can be done, there's no particular reason to believe that it's easy to get working properly. The messy mix of EFI 1.x and UEFI 2.x that Apple uses could make things even trickier.
  - xserve2009 12y ago
    Early 2009 X-Serve? It has a quad-core Xeon processor. [update] I am wrong. It is the late 2008 X-Serve that won't upgrade ... Specs: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP10?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/SP10?locale=en_US Supported H/W: iMac (Mid 2007 or newer) MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer) MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer) MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer) Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer) Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer) Xserve (Early 2009) from https://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/ https://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/
vacri 12y ago
usually run well even on 5+ years old hardware At my last office we had older macs, a mix of laptops and desktops. They all ran slow, with one user's mac pro using all 4GB RAM on a fresh boot with nothing loaded. These folks were normal users, not power users. When a new OSX release would come out, a few people would upgrade, have a ton of problems, and warn everyone else. I ran linux myself, and was occasionally called over to help with an OSX problem, and I could never understand how my colleagues could stand to work on such slow computers. In my experience, older macs do not usually run well on newer OSX.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  I recall the same pain with Vista - booting to an empty desktop saw insane RAM usage.
dguaraglia 12y ago
<citation needed> on the "run well even on 5+ years old hardware" bit. Sure, the OS will boot and work, but that doesn't mean things will work well. My late 2011 13-in MacBook Pro became unbearably slow after doing a clean upgrade to Mavericks. Only upgrading the memory to 8GB (which was not supported by Apple for that model) fixed the issue. Yosemite works, but looks like crap on anything without a retina display. Newer versions of iOS have a habit of making older phones become sluggish when compared with the same phone model running an older version of iOS. I'm not expecting Microsoft-level backwards compatibility, but as someone that has a somewhat complex development environment having to get everything to work on a new version of the OS can take up to a week of tweaking.
- MBCook 12y ago
  I'm currently running the latest version of Yosemite. I have a 2010 MacBook Pro 15 inch with eight gigs of RAM and an SSD. I've had little bugs and fiddly bugs with Safari and a few other things, but I really thinks it has worked fine for years and years on the machine. It noticeably improved when they added RAM compression (was that Mavericks?). I don't find the graphics a problem at all, although they do look better on my Retina iMac. I got used to them pretty quickly. I've been happy with most OS updates as they sped Safari up or fixed small bugs in it. Photos for OS X is a MASSIVE speed improvement over iPhoto. I know some people run into pretty catastrophic bugs from time to time, I haven't had that experience personally. The idea that the OS doesn't run well on five-year-old hardware is bunk. I have no need to replace my MacBook Pro, The only thing it's not good at is 3D (and it was never very good at that). If you have enough RAM and replace the spinning disk old Macs feel fantastic with a if you have enough RAM and replace the spinning hard drive old Mac still feel fantastic with a recent OS. If you're on a 5400rpm drive with 2GB I'm sure it's painful. But I know even 4GB machines fair very well. SSDs just make an insanely big difference.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    Did you upgrade to an SSD? I have a 2012 MBP non-retina with a slow Toshiba drive in it (it seems it is entirely coincidental whether you'll get a Toshiba or Samsung in your new MacBook!) and I am considering upgrading to an SSD. I use BootCamp (periodic Windows gaming) and have a bunch of large VMs within OSX, so I would be interested in how the upgrade went and where to look, how to clone my disk etc. etc.

driverdan 12y ago

Or LTS versions of Linux.

tsieling 12y ago

> Apple's model customer is one who upgrades often. I don't know any tech company that doesn't have that idea of a model customer :) To their credit, I can run the latest on a pretty old Mac Mini at home. It's not as fast as it used to be, but it is supported long after the form factor of the Mini has undergone big changes. I don't consider myself being squeezed to upgrade.

s_q_b 12y ago
I booted up one of those G3 candy colored clamshell iBooks from the early 2000s recently. Not only did start flawlessly, it found and connected to the WiFi, and actually loaded Google on Internet Explorer for Mac.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  Out of interest, did it display the results pages from Google alright? Or was the CSS and JavaScript etc. not recognised? Was it usable, speedwise, as a machine?
  - s_q_b 12y ago
    As a word processor, typing out some code, or as a spreadsheet machine, yes, it was perfectly serviceable. It worked with very little of the modern web, however.
  - s_q_b 12y ago
    To answer your question about Google specifically, yes, it did work fine for search. It wasn't even that slow.

s_q_b 12y ago

Or your IT department could force you to use a Golden Master of 10.9, and not let you update.

n_blom 12y ago

Holy Apple can't be wrong. Microsoft bad bad and clunky. We're talking about a security issue!

gurkendoktor 12y ago

> If you want solid support for old products, stick with Microsoft, and accept that their products can be clunkier because of deliberate choices to maintain backwards-compatibility. It's not only about support for "old" products, it's also about having a roadmap to begin with. It used to be common wisdom that Apple releases major updates for the current version of OS X, and security fixes for the last two versions. Well, that common wisdom is outdated now. Also, backwards compatibility and security fixes are not really the same, and I'd say that the correlation between backwards compatibility and software quality is completely overrated. I know I'd rather trust my life to Windows 7 (the epitome of conservative OS design) than to OS X 10.10 or iOS 8 (speaking as an iOS developer). In raw numbers, 45% of OS X users are now vulnerable (and probably don't even know about it), and Apple doesn't care. That's an insane number. And I thought not patching the ~10% iPhone 4 in the wild was dangerous!