Apple's built their entire company on dropping backwards compatibility. It's how they've maintained their agility for so long, despite being one of the largest companies on the planet.
I am prone to defend them, but they do it in a sensical way (most of the time), I plugged in a G3 whose hard drive was last written to when I was playing hopscotch and when I connected it to wifi it had an official update patch ready for me. They aren't perfect but how many other companies do that. I'd argue that their unflinchingness to move on hardware-wise, and long software support is what gave them success.
Yeah imo they support backwards compatibility where it matters and their hardware is useful for longer as a result. They’re also not afraid to drop it when it’s important to do so.
Alas they didn't become one of the largest companies on the planet because of how they treated their macOS userbase.
Especially nowadays it seems their biggest asset became that they produce good PC-hardware on such a high economics of scale that they're almost unreachable in build-quality...
> Alas they didn't become one of the largest companies on the planet because of how they treated their macOS userbase.
I’m not so sure. We love to complain about Apple, but I don’t see many old timer Mac users now extolling the virtues of Windows. It’s dangerous extrapolating one’s own observations to the world at large, so maybe I’m wrong?
> We love to complain about Apple, but I don’t see many old timer Mac users now extolling the virtues of Windows.
This might be true, but macOS in general is not what made Apple one of the largest companies on the planet.
That's not about complaining, it's about correlation and causation. It's like saying Apple's Wi-Fi routers must be the best because Apple became one of the largest companies on the planet.
I'd say without the iOS ecosystem they would be a well-respected company in the premium tier of their industry, like Dyson or B&O.
I would say that counterintuitively, it’s a factor in the Mac’s strong indieware/botique software scene, which has been going for decades now. Most devs in that camp keep up with the platform changes and those who don’t get swept away, opening up space for someone else to fill that niche.
A couple of long-standing small Mac-focused companies that come to mind are Panic and The Omni Group, which have been building high quality software since the days of classic Mac OS and NeXTSTEP, respectively and are among the fastest to adopt new things coming out of Apple.
They've started to drop the ball, but Apple also was really good at simplifying things to the point that its infamous "just works" slogan was apt.
I switched to mac circa 2003 and reliably connecting to wifi was simple, clean, and intuitive. This was the height of the shitshow that was wireless networking on windows, where half the time windows would fight with the vendor software, etc.
I was even more shocked when I hit the "advanced" button and there was full and working advanced BSD networking settings cleanly laid out, from overriding IP/netmask/router, 802.1X, etc. Windows made it difficult and frustrating to apply these kinds of settings, because they wanted to hide it from the user.
They have somewhere near 10% share of the laptop market and the new Apple Silicon stuff absolutely cooks. For an afterthought, they're an exceptionally well-built and well-loved one that people enjoy using.
This is not entirely true - they’ve invested quite a bit in maintaining backwards compatibility at least hardware side through various emulation or translation layers : first during the ppc/x86 migration then more recently with the x86 to arm shift.
