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[QUOTE=&quot;n2rj, post: 100830, member: 5768&quot;]It's more complicated than that, Rick. There is also the question of how much legacy support you want to provide, and what your margins on software are.Apple is primarily a hardware company. They make good margins on hardware. Software on the other hand is practically given away, likely as a loss leader for hardware. That's why new releases take advantage of new features but can't go back all the way to support very old hardware.By the way, there is a lot of what you describe - disabling features to support older hardware.&nbsp; I do it when writing iOS apps all the time. There's <a href="https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPFrameworks/Concepts/WeakLinking.html">&quot;weak linking&quot;</a> where you can link against a framework and if it is available you use it. It gets very tedious though and when you consider that most people are running the latest version, why even bother...The end user doesn't need that. They need to know that they can send photos to grandma, check their online banking or play angry birds. They don't need to know the inner workings of an OS. All of that is handled for them, leaving them to be productive. As a result, computing today is accessible to every person and not just a select few.But with Apple, <a href="http://www.apple.com/opensource/">a lot of it is open source</a> so if you wanted to know about the inner workings, you can knock yourself out. I can guarantee you that it is a million times more complicated than the DOS days though.A lot of open source developers use Apple's open source code in their projects. Grand Central dispatch has made its way into BSD for example, and there is even GNUStep which is an open source implementation of Cocoa.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE="n2rj, post: 100830, member: 5768"]It's more complicated than that, Rick. There is also the question of how much legacy support you want to provide, and what your margins on software are. Apple is primarily a hardware company. They make good margins on hardware. Software on the other hand is practically given away, likely as a loss leader for hardware. That's why new releases take advantage of new features but can't go back all the way to support very old hardware. By the way, there is a lot of what you describe - disabling features to support older hardware. I do it when writing iOS apps all the time. There's [url=https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPFrameworks/Concepts/WeakLinking.html]"weak linking"[/url] where you can link against a framework and if it is available you use it. It gets very tedious though and when you consider that most people are running the latest version, why even bother... The end user doesn't need that. They need to know that they can send photos to grandma, check their online banking or play angry birds. They don't need to know the inner workings of an OS. All of that is handled for them, leaving them to be productive. As a result, computing today is accessible to every person and not just a select few. But with Apple, [url=http://www.apple.com/opensource/]a lot of it is open source[/url] so if you wanted to know about the inner workings, you can knock yourself out. I can guarantee you that it is a million times more complicated than the DOS days though. A lot of open source developers use Apple's open source code in their projects. Grand Central dispatch has made its way into BSD for example, and there is even GNUStep which is an open source implementation of Cocoa.[/QUOTE]

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