[a1o]

Not only that, imagine you release something for some Mac, and it goes from PowerPC to Intel, now you adapt your OpenGL code in OSX, now OSX doesn't work in 32-bit, now you need to use Cocoa, Quartz, Uikit or whatever. Hey, we now named it macOS, what about moving your OpenGL to Metal? And we are not x86 now, we are Apple Silicon. This is just one platform, there are several that changed and required adaptation in the software. Some also died, so if produced great software for Silicon Graphics, Sparc, Amiga or whatever, well, you will have to update the software to port over to somewhere too.

[ryandrake]

Unpopular opinion, but software should not have to keep up with this treadmill. Especially since the treadmill is a deliberate choice the OS vendor is making, and not some fundamental attribute of software. Bits don't tend to simply rot. The foundation they are planted on deliberately gets broken. The vendor could choose to allow backwards compatibility, but often chooses not to.

Sorry, but when I write a program in 2010, I kind of do expect it to still work on the exact same hardware in 2020. I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation.

[jolux]

> The vendor could choose to allow backwards compatibility, but often chooses not to.

This too entails a tradeoff: either the old software sits around in the system collecting defects, or it ends up supported indefinitely and the amount of work required to cut a new OS release increases without bound.

> Sorry, but when I write a program in 2010, I kind of do expect it to still work on the exact same hardware in 2020. I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation.

Unreasonable compared to what? In the abstract it’s not unreasonable but computers are quite an unreasonable environment to begin with. Their capabilities change dramatically every few years, and computers on the internet especially have to withstand essentially constant attempts at intrusion and abuse.

[mid-kid]

Apple is a particularly bad example of this kind of churn. They have an iron grip on the entire ecosystem and can get away with it, but you have to wonder at what cost.

[seec]

I believe they lose the goodwill of their users over time. At some point they get pissed off and move on to a cheaper more stable option. I am a historical mac user (started using system 9) and I am disillusioned about Apple. They change things too much, too often, for what are generally very litte benefits at a tremendous cost.

Everybody is over the moon about Apple Silicon, but so far what I see is that we completely lost Windows/other systems capabilities, got even more uncompetitive GPUs than they used to be (if losing windows compatibility wasn't enough, they had to make sure you couldn't play a single game properly) and price and skyrocketed. For what? A better battery life, and a lot of marketing on how things are supposedly faster but outside of video processing they are definitely not if you make equivalent pricing comparison. Power is cheap and ubiquitous, mobile high-performance computing makes no sense at all; external batteries are cheap if they are really needed.

And now you have to deal with annoying software incompatibility, updates of all kinds and re-purchasing stuff that was working just fine before. Some software didn't even get updated and will never because companies have decided it wasn't worth the trouble (they are right).

Sometimes I see some people complain about Windows updates and whatnot. Well, compared to Apple shenanigans, I really do not mind them. I like not even registering on the annoyance scale compared to Apple bullshit.

[0x000xca0xfe]

Obviously at the cost of having a weaker gaming ecosystem than Linux.

They showed off the powerful GPU of their new M3 yesterday and chose... Myst. Now that is almost comical.