> it's all just a different flavor of Windows at this point
Frankly I don't think that's fair to Windows. There would be a shitstorm of epic proportions if Microsoft unilaterally broke compatibility with thousands and thousands of programs, tools and workflows like Big Sur has done.
Big Sur has been out for 3 months now and the company I work for, like many others, has a blanket ban on upgrading to it because of mountains of compatibility problems with mission-critical software.
I have said this before but here I go again: the company I work for is still maintaining a program written in 1999 in Visual Basic 6.0 nearly unchanged on Windows in 32bit.
Windows is the perfect platform for us because it makes our applications so much less expensive to develop. We are a profitable company with hundreds of B2B customers and thousands of users that deploy on their own hardware and we can deliver our software without Docker or anything because the application just runs on any Windows version since XP. It's basically write and forget (apart from a few hickups here and there when Windows Update accidentally breakes something).
We have been working for years to replace parts of the VB6 application with modern .NET libraries and while this is unsupported by Microsoft, it's still working. The VB application hosts the modern .NET libraries and integrates its functionalities and new functionality is exclusively developed in .NET. Our development speed is not impacted by deprecated APIs that we have to urgently address. We can take our time to improve things without our customers noticing.
If we were supporting macOS, we would have shut down a long time ago. It would've been impossible for us to keep up with yearly macOS API changes and to add new features at the same time.
Backward compatibility is heavily underrated. Windows isn’t my favorite experience in some ways but I’m starting to realize just how compelling a long-running consistent execution environment really is after losing enough mac software to time.
My side project is a Windows application I started writing on Windows XP. I had to make a grand total of 0 changes to the app to support Windows 7, Vista, and 10.
It will still run on anything from XP to Windows 10.
I think the comparison is a little non-sequitur. Classic visual basic hasn't had a feature released since 1998 and supported ended in 2005 (with extended in 2008).
It's not a part of Windows itself per se, but a runtime environment. Couldn't you just as well have written an app in Java, which has also kept good backwards compatibility and could still be run on both Windows and MacOS with minimal changes?
Windows maintains backwards compatibility to an amazing level compared to Macs.
If there were a version of Visual Basic for Mac released alongside the Windows version back in 1998, it would have been a classic Mac app which Apple dropped support for after Mac OS 10.4 and never had on Intel-based Macs.
If Microsoft had updated this theoretical Visual Basic for Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X back in 2008, Apple would have dropped support for it with Catalina, which ditched 32-bit app support.
What you're hoping for just wouldn't have worked except for a runtime that was still being supported by the publisher to make the jump from Mac Classic to OS X and then again from 32-bit to 64-bit as Apple broke backwards compatibility.
If Microsoft had somehow brought Mac VB out of retirement twice and done both of the above, Apple would be dropping support for it again a few years from now when they drop Rosetta and only support M1-based apps on Mac OS.
Here is a more modern example, after acknowledging that WinRT hasn't been the success they wanted, and starting the Reunion project to merge Win32 and UWP worlds, they are still running them in parallel and it will take several years to fix 8 years of doubling down on WinRT in detriment of Win32, but they will eventually get there even if the ride isn't as smooth as it should be (like killing C++/CX).
VB6 is a good demonstration of the point being made. Even though development stopped two decades ago and support ended a decade ago, they can continue to use it. They probably didn't anticipate development of VB being dropped so soon, but Microsoft had (and continues to have) a history of maintaining backward compatibility.
While dropping support for VB would have had negative consequences and using Java may have been better, we only know that in hindsight. Java was about half the age of VB at that point in time, it's most vocal advocates seemed to be more interested in cutting Microsoft down to size, while it had a mixed reception among both developers and end users. None of those qualities bode well in the long term, especially from the perspective of those invested in Microsoft technologies.
Everything is running in firewalled environments. Literally nothing written in VB6 is publicly accessible. We are using .NET since the release of .NET Framework 2.0 and only very old code is VB6.
Can anything that lives in that firewalled environment reach out to the internet or have stuff reach in? If so, it’s only a matter of time before something gets popped and it’s a bastion to access everything else behind the firewall.
This isn’t even nation state level attacks, it’s pretty standard behavior for botnets and ransomware.
Is the scenario here that they're already compromised with a relay between outside and inside that doesn't need the VB6 app, and then they can compromise the VB6?
Extra malicious hosts are never great but this isn't exactly a dealbreaker.
Unfortunately you have the PR of Apple to deal with too.
I manage hundreds of Macs and the users are constantly howling about not being able to use Big Sur yet. I can explain there are still many dealbreaking bugs (the 11.2 upgrade space problem caused major headaches taking hours to fix in my testing!), it's slower and more screenspace wasteful but they keep wanting it because of Apple's snazzy PR. There's also a major issue with AD accounts getting completely blocked after the upgrade.
Of course what doesn't help is that new Macs come with Big Sur by default and can't really be downgraded. So we have to support it at least for new machines.
- AD accounts get completely broken after the update (can't log in due to an MDM profile intended for local accounts now applies to AD mobile accounts as well). Confirmed by Apple support but still pending a fix
- Apple keeps introducing bugs, I was close to push the button for mass upgrades with 11.2 but then they introduced the space bug which caused macs to be locked in a bootloop that can't be fixed without another Mac present with an older OS version: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/02/15/macos-big-sur-11-2-1-re... . This really should never have made it through QA.
- Our VPN still has issues with random disconnects that are still being investigated (they switched over to network extensions so this was a big rewrite for them)
- Our antivirus only supports Big Sur as of about 1 month ago. So this was a blocking point for a long time that's only just been resolved. This was also due to the system extension thing mainly (and yes they could have done this sooner as this was already on the cards with Catalina, absolutely)
All in all this is not at a level I call "stable" and that's not all third-party compatibility issues either, some of them are pure Apple.
When I say that it's slower and wastes more screen space, that's a matter of opinion (at least of the impact of these things). But these are not a reason for me to block the upgrade, it's just something I would mention to explain why it's not such a big deal that they can't have it yet :) I will allow it when it actually works reliably.
As the article explains, Apple's PR is not always aligned with reality. Updates are indeed slower and I often hear the fan running hard since Big Sur when it wouldn't before. Especially the WindowServer process uses a lot of CPU now for some reason.
Add to the list, screen sharing became very very spotty and no longer works on a headless Mac without first waking it up and restarting the screen share process. There’s no way they actually qa’d this.
Another fun one, refresh rates will sometimes go back to 60 but the drop down shows the higher rate and only fixes once you toggle. Never had this happen before Big Sur.
Aha I have not even noticed this issue, I will have a look. But we don't use the built-in screen sharing in production. Some of my test boxes have it though, but they're also on an IP KVM luckily.
Don't hold your breath for Box Sync to be fixed--it wasn't working right previous to Big Sur being delivered. Box Drive seems to be the only software that works semi-reliably these days.
Which is why they: do WWDC, provide Xcode for free, put machine learning acceleration into the M1, created a brand new Virtualization framework, demoed Linux on the M1 Macs, develop their own professional software for Macs (Final Cut, Logic)..?
They force you to use it to develop any app for iOS and macOS - it's a significant financial investment to get there ( you need a mac, a developer account), if you had to pay for Xcode as well... ( to be fair, you probably pay for it in a way with the developer account)
>Big Sur has been out for 3 months now and the company I work for, like many others, has a blanket ban on upgrading to it because of mountains of compatibility problems with mission-critical software.
I have being a Mac user since Apple II. All these changes really saddens me. Can we start some kind group similar to class action law suit to pressure Apple into changing this kind of behaviour in Big Sur. If not enough people upgrade, maybe they will have skip a version and come out with something more light weight. I think that happened with Snow Leopard ( don't remember the exact one).
There is already a group of people applying this pressure. Ex-customers who have stopped buying their products. Join us.
Along with many others it seems, Catalina is the last version of macOS I'll be using.
I have a 2013 27" iMac and as of mid-last year I was considering buying a new one sometime in 2021, but I've now changed my mind, due to decisions Apple has made about how they handle their desktop operating system.
Thanks, is there a group where we can join? Maybe a web site would be great. Please post a link or PM me if you know. It relates to both personal and professional usage of MacOS.
It is so sad and misguided from Apple. I remember when OSX 10.0 came out. A nice Apple UI on BSD core! I immediately rushed to buy an Apple laptop, my first Apple product ever (only Linux/Solaris/otherUNIXs before that).
Been on Apple desktops ever since. But the decline in the last several years has been sharp and no longer tolerable to me. I'm still on a Mac dekstop but I'm on 10.11 and will never upgrade. As OSX becomes closer and closer to an iOS-style user-hostile walled garden, I'm not interested. It'll be back to a Linux (maybe, BSD) desktop after this machine no longer works.
I really hope that something can be done, but Tim Cook's hostility towards the end user gives me a feeling that they're not interested. Don't get me wrong, though, Cook's grip on Apple has offered some much-needed upgrades in a lot of key ares, but the power-user has been ignored the entire time. I also get the feeling that their interest lies in engineering the Mac to appeal to the lowest common denominator. They can sell an iPhone to anyone, they can sell an iPad to anyone, but they can't sell a Mac to just anyone. The solution? Make it run iPhone and iPad apps.
Frankly I don't think that's fair to Windows. There would be a shitstorm of epic proportions if Microsoft unilaterally broke compatibility with thousands and thousands of programs, tools and workflows like Big Sur has done.
Big Sur has been out for 3 months now and the company I work for, like many others, has a blanket ban on upgrading to it because of mountains of compatibility problems with mission-critical software.