[turquoisevar]

God no.

As an end user it’s already annoying how, mainly big devs, are extremely slow in adopting the latest APIs, this would only motivate them more to just sit on their laurels.

As a dev for Apple platforms it would become a buggy mess and would lead to less bumping of target OS versions, which in turn leads to needing to reinvent wheels and coming up with time consuming workarounds.

Just one look at the gazillion ways Windows 11 has implemented configuration apps, from as far back as the XP era, has me shudder. You start out with Win 11 stuff but oh, you want to use that one thing? Now you’re lopped into Windows 7 stuff oh you want this other thing, enjoy this XP app, etc, etc. All in the name of backwards compatibility, no thank you.

Hell, the fact that they had to skip Windows 9 because of so many devs checking for a 9 to detect 95/98 is another such messy nonsense.

If I had to choose between that experience or Apple forcing me every year to learn an entirely new programming language + UI framework + persistent storage framework I’ll happily become a polyglot because the MS way of doing things is ridiculous.

[andybak]

Software shouldn't stop working. Unique and amazing things whither and die. That feels wrong to me.

(Of course the problem is that it's damn hard to run old versions of iOS under emulation. That's the solution that would appease me)

[turquoisevar]

The older versions are surprisingly emulatabe; there's just not that much interest in packaging it in a way that is accessible for the average user.

[giancarlostoro]

What I really dont get is why in some cases, when it looks obvious to me that the XP UI is just some Microsoft GUI for the drivers, why Microsoft didn't consolidate those APIs into the modern UI. They own the entire run-time, I don't understand why they cannot add a translation layer.

[tadfisher]

XP? They still have the NT 3.5 UI if you dig deep enough. Translating these is just asking for trouble when an important checkbox moves out of the frame because the original dev, in 1993, placed it with absolute coordinates. And there's no way in hell MS has access to all of these vintage drivers.

[giancarlostoro]

The driver has to talk to the OS somehow, and they have insane amount of telemetry, might as well use it to some actual usefulness. Always allow a way to "use the old UI" with this approach, but at least then, you can have more uniformity.

[turquoisevar]

It beats me; as you said, it would take relatively modest efforts to add a translation layer.

Especially considering that most of it already is a translation layer for the Windows Registry.

[giancarlostoro]

Well they own the entire platform, and they know which APIs are called by drivers. I feel like its doable.

[incrudible]

Most software is written for ten year business cycles. Maybe the Apple approach makes sense for most consumers and the few little apps they use, but there's reasons why Microsoft is so strong in the enterprise, and backwards compatibility is a huge part of that.

[turquoisevar]

I’d say that more and more are moving to SaaS and/or platform-agnostic web-based stuff (even if it just runs on an on-prem server).

But you’re right in that a lot of enterprise software is/was written with ten years or more in mind.

Having seen it in action, I wonder if that’s the right course of action just in terms of security and what passed as acceptable UI alone, but I suppose that’s a topic for another time. For most enterprises, it’s a cost consideration where there’s a high tolerance for crap as long as it means that it saves money.

While Apple is nowhere near as uncommon in the enterprise world as it used to be, it’s no secret that enterprise is far down Apple’s priority list. Backward compatibility (or rather lack of motivation to facilitate that) might very well be a factor in that, but it seems to be more a matter of not needing to tap into that market.