Well, there went Boot Camp as a serious application.
So that’s six people who don’t comprehend anything about why Apple would stop supporting anything but their competitor’s worst software. Want to try for seven?
Oh, and where’s MY update to Boot Camp Utility that includes Windows 8 drivers? Because even 7’s set refused to actually work with my graphics card.
Getting Win7 to boot on this hardware doesn't just happen magically. There's significant development effort to maintain compatibility with Windows 7 on a Mac.
Consider:
- Windows 7 uses a slightly different driver model, that requires drivers to be developed for both Win7 and Win8.x
- Windows 7's uEFI booter is a piece of crap and doesn't work with a display adapter that has an EFI byte code ROM, and requires an ancient video BIOS that responds to the old school 30-year old INT13h bootstrap, which has been used exactly never on the Mac. Thus, any Mac using boot camp to get to Windows 7 is doing it through the EFI compatibility support module (CSM), which Apple then has to maintain and continue developing. Windows 8 can boot on the native EFI on any 64-bit Mac, so the CSM can be removed from future models and no longer developed.
- Any OS booting without the CSM boots stupidly faster, because it's talking in 1MB chunks to the disk controller, rather than old-school 64K chunks until the OS drivers load. Windows 7 under CSM on a MacPro4 takes 90 seconds to load, where Windows 8 on native EFI takes 15 seconds on the same machine.
- Most people's problem with Windows 8 (besides it being Windows) is the garbage UI. This can be fixed through a multitude of 3rd party ways to make it look, act, and feel like Windows 7.
- Windows 7's uEFI booter is a piece of crap and doesn't work with a display adapter that has an EFI byte code ROM, and requires an ancient video BIOS that responds to the old school 30-year old INT13h bootstrap, which has been used exactly never on the Mac. Thus, any Mac using boot camp to get to Windows 7 is doing it through the EFI compatibility support module (CSM), which Apple then has to maintain and continue developing. Windows 8 can boot on the native EFI on any 64-bit Mac, so the CSM can be removed from future models and no longer developed.
- Any OS booting without the CSM boots stupidly faster, because it's talking in 1MB chunks to the disk controller, rather than old-school 64K chunks until the OS drivers load. Windows 7 under CSM on a MacPro4 takes 90 seconds to load, where Windows 8 on native EFI takes 15 seconds on the same machine.
That is one hell of an insightful explanation, thank you.
I really like Windows 8. It's not OS X but it is actually a great OS when you get used to it and to be honest that's mostly a day's worth of use.
Windows 8.1 has gone a massive way to bringing back a psuedo Windows 7 feel but I feel Windows 8 is a much better product and I quite liked Windows 7.
People are scared of change and I admit that the forced change threw many. It took me 1/2 hour to work out how to shut the machine down when I first tried it and it still doesn't make sense to me but frankly Windows 8 is definitely the product to choose. Think of the Start screen as more of a versatile QuickLaunch and you'll get the idea. It's not perfect but then I prefer it well over the old Start menu in my not so humble opinion.
The rumours of the next update to Windows 8.1 are going to get more people onboard because it is supposedly going to allow machines running 1GB RAM to run which is possible in Windows 7 but I'd recommend smashing your testicles with a hammer before I recommend running Windows 7 with 1GB RAM.
Windows 8 has been widely shunned & licences can still be purchased for Windows 7. This is a poor move for Apples customers who require bootcamp.
Actually no it isn't. It's being shunned by corporates but corporates are traditionally lazy fools who refuse to upgrade anything until it's too late. I know. I did a project about 6 years ago to upgrade a corporate office to Windows XP from Win2K. They're going to be screwed next month aren't they? They haven't even looked at Windows 7 let alone 8.
Many consumers hate Windows 8 but that's because they hate computers in general but have been forced to upgrade to a new machine because their one died. Truth be told most are upgrading because their machine is 5 years old and ran Windows XP so even going to Windows 7 would have thrown them.
Once you get used to the interface it's actually far more productive than the stupid Start menu, there's a reason why people stupidly fill their desktop with shortcuts. Windows 8's Start screen actually reduces this need. It is also far more stable believe it or not and right out of the box you get virus and spyware protection so you don't need to waste resources with Norton or McAfee et al.
I agree; dumping W7 from the nMP is an understandable move. In tech, you just don't support legacy software.
There was a really great indepth article in a different thread last week explaining all of the nasty legacy garbage that Windows lugs around from version to version since the 90's.
@PB - did you ever get achnace to read it? Or was it you that posted the link? I read it in full and it was a great although exausting!
Getting Win7 to boot on this hardware doesn't just happen magically. There's significant development effort to maintain compatibility with Windows 7 on a Mac.
Consider:
- Windows 7 uses a slightly different driver model, that requires drivers to be developed for both Win7 and Win8.x
- Windows 7's uEFI booter is a piece of crap and doesn't work with a display adapter that has an EFI byte code ROM, and requires an ancient video BIOS that responds to the old school 30-year old INT13h bootstrap, which has been used exactly never on the Mac. Thus, any Mac using boot camp to get to Windows 7 is doing it through the EFI compatibility support module (CSM), which Apple then has to maintain and continue developing. Windows 8 can boot on the native EFI on any 64-bit Mac, so the CSM can be removed from future models and no longer developed.
- Any OS booting without the CSM boots stupidly faster, because it's talking in 1MB chunks to the disk controller, rather than old-school 64K chunks until the OS drivers load. Windows 7 under CSM on a MacPro4 takes 90 seconds to load, where Windows 8 on native EFI takes 15 seconds on the same machine.
- Most people's problem with Windows 8 (besides it being Windows) is the garbage UI. This can be fixed through a multitude of 3rd party ways to make it look, act, and feel like Windows 7.
I use Win7 for a handful of non-OSX apps. I don't want to upgrade my alternate-OS until those apps force the issue.
Of course, when I update HW I have to buy a new license, anyway, so Win 8 will have its day.
I doubt a whole lot of power users hang on to HW for more than 3 years (you might have some kind of disparity in your laptop/desktop upgrade cycle, if you use one way more than the other, but even then 3 years is pushing it; I'd guess your average user isn't upgrading much less frequently than that.)
Seems like a non-issue outside of a few fringe cases (which exist for any change, of any kind.)
Why assume it is Apple? Microsoft isn't exactly pushing 7. Further how many Mac Pro people want to run 7 in boot camp? In Parallel or Fusion maybe.
I certainly would not bother with Bootcamp for one.
But out of interest as I don't run Bootcamp, perhaps someone who is on a MBP running Bootcamp and Win7 might compare the results from my nMP running VMWare. I have no idea if these are good or not, not being a Windows person.
The Geekbench is only 32 bit as I only have the demo version for PC which is limited to 32 bit.
Getting Win7 to boot on this hardware doesn't just happen magically. There's significant development effort to maintain compatibility with Windows 7 on a Mac.
Consider:
- Windows 7 uses a slightly different driver model, that requires drivers to be developed for both Win7 and Win8.x
- Windows 7's uEFI booter is a piece of crap and doesn't work with a display adapter that has an EFI byte code ROM, and requires an ancient video BIOS that responds to the old school 30-year old INT13h bootstrap, which has been used exactly never on the Mac. Thus, any Mac using boot camp to get to Windows 7 is doing it through the EFI compatibility support module (CSM), which Apple then has to maintain and continue developing. Windows 8 can boot on the native EFI on any 64-bit Mac, so the CSM can be removed from future models and no longer developed.
- Any OS booting without the CSM boots stupidly faster, because it's talking in 1MB chunks to the disk controller, rather than old-school 64K chunks until the OS drivers load. Windows 7 under CSM on a MacPro4 takes 90 seconds to load, where Windows 8 on native EFI takes 15 seconds on the same machine.
- Most people's problem with Windows 8 (besides it being Windows) is the garbage UI. This can be fixed through a multitude of 3rd party ways to make it look, act, and feel like Windows 7.
Just for information purposes my Win 7 launches in VMware on a nMP in a shade under 4 seconds. :smokey: (from sleep mode of course but why would I shut down 7 in a VM?)
I agree; dumping W7 from the nMP is an understandable move. In tech, you just don't support legacy software.
Regardless of the merits of the first sentence, the second sentence just isn't true. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc. make tons and tons of money supporting old versions of their software. Apple's the outlier in its shorter end-of-life deadlines for old versions of software.
Regardless of the merits of the first sentence, the second sentence just isn't true. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc. make tons and tons of money supporting old versions of their software. Apple's the outlier in its shorter end-of-life deadlines for old versions of software.
You can't say 'just isn't true' either. It depends on the business model.
Looking at the market caps of all those you mention then Apple's makes me think Apple isn't totally stupid to cast off and move on. It seems to be working pretty well for them.
You can't say 'just isn't true' either. It depends on the business model.
Looking at the market caps of all those you mention then Apple's makes me think Apple isn't totally stupid to cast off and move on. It seems to be working pretty well for them.
Perhaps I shouldn't have echoed the word "just," but all I was saying was that the OP's statement isn't true. The contrapositive of the OP's statement that "in tech you just don't support legacy software" is not "in tech you must support legacy software." I never said that.
Market caps seem like strange evidence to make your point, though. Apple's may have the single highest of the five companies I named, but in the aggregate the other companies' market caps add up to considerably more than Apple's.
I think the real issue is that Apple's not really focused on the corporate and institutional markets (aside from maybe K-12, where I think they're doing it mainly to win future consumers). In the consumer space that Apple operates in, most of their customers are content with being forced to upgrade. Corporate and institutional IT departments are (largely) not interested in being forced to upgrade. Apple can get away with not supporting legacy software in a way that its "competitors" can't because they're selling to different kinds of customers.
Those FAA flight bag tablets will be an interesting test. The airlines are going to insist that those things be rock solid. That means that they're not going to upgrade them right away every time a patch comes out for iOS, and so they're going to insist on legacy support. Is Apple ready to provide that? (I think they are, or at least they can be, but it's going to provoke a bit of change in Apple's culture if the corporate and institutional sales really take off.)
I agree; dumping W7 from the nMP is an understandable move. In tech, you just don't support legacy software.
There was a really great indepth article in a different thread last week explaining all of the nasty legacy garbage that Windows lugs around from version to version since the 90's.
@PB - did you ever get achnace to read it? Or was it you that posted the link? I read it in full and it was a great although exausting!
I searched for it, but could't find it. I have read quite a few of those articles from DED on his own RD blog. Some are really great reads.
Perhaps I shouldn't have echoed the word "just," but all I was saying was that the OP's statement isn't true. The contrapositive of the OP's statement that "in tech you just don't support legacy software" is not "in tech you must support legacy software." I never said that.
Market caps seem like strange evidence to make your point, though. Apple's may have the single highest of the five companies I named, but in the aggregate the other companies' market caps add up to considerably more than Apple's.
I think the real issue is that Apple's not really focused on the corporate and institutional markets (aside from maybe K-12, where I think they're doing it mainly to win future consumers). In the consumer space that Apple operates in, most of their customers are content with being forced to upgrade. Corporate and institutional IT departments are (largely) not interested in being forced to upgrade. Apple can get away with not supporting legacy software in a way that its "competitors" can't because they're selling to different kinds of customers.
Those FAA flight bag tablets will be an interesting test. The airlines are going to insist that those things be rock solid. That means that they're not going to upgrade them right away every time a patch comes out for iOS, and so they're going to insist on legacy support. Is Apple ready to provide that? (I think they are, or at least they can be, but it's going to provoke a bit of change in Apple's culture if the corporate and institutional sales really take off.)
I agree with much of what you say, but aggregating those five companies.... really? Not sure what point that was supposed to make? I could aggregate a lot of lesser company's market caps to come to more than Apple's, so what? My point was simple by mentioning their 'individual' caps ... Apple seems to be doing OK, that's all.
It's also a strange thing to think a company, by your inference, might prefer a product that isn't updated over one that is .... I guess the airlines would be better off with Win XP It could just be we are entering new times and new IT attitudes, you can but hope.
Not a big deal. If you have latest Mac, you can also run windows on VM. New Macs now equipped with SSD, so running macs and older windows like XP or 7 in VM would be flawlessly.
The only problem I see is this IMHO is a dumb move because it is well known most businesses have forgone windows 8 and keep Windows 7. This is why most serious applications for Windows still support Windows 7. Plus the outrageous yearly fees for employers is pushing them to Linux servers.
Comments
So that’s six people who don’t comprehend anything about why Apple would stop supporting anything but their competitor’s worst software. Want to try for seven?
Oh, and where’s MY update to Boot Camp Utility that includes Windows 8 drivers? Because even 7’s set refused to actually work with my graphics card.
Getting Win7 to boot on this hardware doesn't just happen magically. There's significant development effort to maintain compatibility with Windows 7 on a Mac.
Consider:
- Windows 7 uses a slightly different driver model, that requires drivers to be developed for both Win7 and Win8.x
- Windows 7's uEFI booter is a piece of crap and doesn't work with a display adapter that has an EFI byte code ROM, and requires an ancient video BIOS that responds to the old school 30-year old INT13h bootstrap, which has been used exactly never on the Mac. Thus, any Mac using boot camp to get to Windows 7 is doing it through the EFI compatibility support module (CSM), which Apple then has to maintain and continue developing. Windows 8 can boot on the native EFI on any 64-bit Mac, so the CSM can be removed from future models and no longer developed.
- Any OS booting without the CSM boots stupidly faster, because it's talking in 1MB chunks to the disk controller, rather than old-school 64K chunks until the OS drivers load. Windows 7 under CSM on a MacPro4 takes 90 seconds to load, where Windows 8 on native EFI takes 15 seconds on the same machine.
- Most people's problem with Windows 8 (besides it being Windows) is the garbage UI. This can be fixed through a multitude of 3rd party ways to make it look, act, and feel like Windows 7.
I agree; dumping W7 from the nMP is an understandable move. In tech, you just don't support legacy software.
That is one hell of an insightful explanation, thank you.
Great move! Why run windows on a mac machine? Just let windows machine run windows and mac machine run macs. If one really wants to run both, run vm.
Windows 8.1 has gone a massive way to bringing back a psuedo Windows 7 feel but I feel Windows 8 is a much better product and I quite liked Windows 7.
People are scared of change and I admit that the forced change threw many. It took me 1/2 hour to work out how to shut the machine down when I first tried it and it still doesn't make sense to me but frankly Windows 8 is definitely the product to choose. Think of the Start screen as more of a versatile QuickLaunch and you'll get the idea. It's not perfect but then I prefer it well over the old Start menu in my not so humble opinion.
The rumours of the next update to Windows 8.1 are going to get more people onboard because it is supposedly going to allow machines running 1GB RAM to run which is possible in Windows 7 but I'd recommend smashing your testicles with a hammer before I recommend running Windows 7 with 1GB RAM.
Windows 8 has been widely shunned & licences can still be purchased for Windows 7. This is a poor move for Apples customers who require bootcamp.
Actually no it isn't. It's being shunned by corporates but corporates are traditionally lazy fools who refuse to upgrade anything until it's too late. I know. I did a project about 6 years ago to upgrade a corporate office to Windows XP from Win2K. They're going to be screwed next month aren't they? They haven't even looked at Windows 7 let alone 8.
Many consumers hate Windows 8 but that's because they hate computers in general but have been forced to upgrade to a new machine because their one died. Truth be told most are upgrading because their machine is 5 years old and ran Windows XP so even going to Windows 7 would have thrown them.
Once you get used to the interface it's actually far more productive than the stupid Start menu, there's a reason why people stupidly fill their desktop with shortcuts. Windows 8's Start screen actually reduces this need. It is also far more stable believe it or not and right out of the box you get virus and spyware protection so you don't need to waste resources with Norton or McAfee et al.
@PB - did you ever get achnace to read it? Or was it you that posted the link? I read it in full and it was a great although exausting!
Thanks for the short version!
Of course, when I update HW I have to buy a new license, anyway, so Win 8 will have its day.
I doubt a whole lot of power users hang on to HW for more than 3 years (you might have some kind of disparity in your laptop/desktop upgrade cycle, if you use one way more than the other, but even then 3 years is pushing it; I'd guess your average user isn't upgrading much less frequently than that.)
Seems like a non-issue outside of a few fringe cases (which exist for any change, of any kind.)
I certainly would not bother with Bootcamp for one.
But out of interest as I don't run Bootcamp, perhaps someone who is on a MBP running Bootcamp and Win7 might compare the results from my nMP running VMWare. I have no idea if these are good or not, not being a Windows person.
The Geekbench is only 32 bit as I only have the demo version for PC which is limited to 32 bit.
Just for information purposes my Win 7 launches in VMware on a nMP in a shade under 4 seconds. :smokey: (from sleep mode of course but why would I shut down 7 in a VM?)
I agree; dumping W7 from the nMP is an understandable move. In tech, you just don't support legacy software.
Regardless of the merits of the first sentence, the second sentence just isn't true. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc. make tons and tons of money supporting old versions of their software. Apple's the outlier in its shorter end-of-life deadlines for old versions of software.
You can't say 'just isn't true' either. It depends on the business model.
Looking at the market caps of all those you mention then Apple's makes me think Apple isn't totally stupid to cast off and move on. It seems to be working pretty well for them.
You can't say 'just isn't true' either. It depends on the business model.
Looking at the market caps of all those you mention then Apple's makes me think Apple isn't totally stupid to cast off and move on. It seems to be working pretty well for them.
Perhaps I shouldn't have echoed the word "just," but all I was saying was that the OP's statement isn't true. The contrapositive of the OP's statement that "in tech you just don't support legacy software" is not "in tech you must support legacy software." I never said that.
Market caps seem like strange evidence to make your point, though. Apple's may have the single highest of the five companies I named, but in the aggregate the other companies' market caps add up to considerably more than Apple's.
I think the real issue is that Apple's not really focused on the corporate and institutional markets (aside from maybe K-12, where I think they're doing it mainly to win future consumers). In the consumer space that Apple operates in, most of their customers are content with being forced to upgrade. Corporate and institutional IT departments are (largely) not interested in being forced to upgrade. Apple can get away with not supporting legacy software in a way that its "competitors" can't because they're selling to different kinds of customers.
Those FAA flight bag tablets will be an interesting test. The airlines are going to insist that those things be rock solid. That means that they're not going to upgrade them right away every time a patch comes out for iOS, and so they're going to insist on legacy support. Is Apple ready to provide that? (I think they are, or at least they can be, but it's going to provoke a bit of change in Apple's culture if the corporate and institutional sales really take off.)
I searched for it, but could't find it. I have read quite a few of those articles from DED on his own RD blog. Some are really great reads.
I agree with much of what you say, but aggregating those five companies.... really? Not sure what point that was supposed to make? I could aggregate a lot of lesser company's market caps to come to more than Apple's, so what? My point was simple by mentioning their 'individual' caps ... Apple seems to be doing OK, that's all.
It's also a strange thing to think a company, by your inference, might prefer a product that isn't updated over one that is .... I guess the airlines would be better off with Win XP
The only problem I see is this IMHO is a dumb move because it is well known most businesses have forgone windows 8 and keep Windows 7. This is why most serious applications for Windows still support Windows 7. Plus the outrageous yearly fees for employers is pushing them to Linux servers.