It's just another tool in the belt. Someone will say that's cheaper than rewriting in safe rust or whatever. (Apple must have a bunch of 1980s code written to 1980s standards. But that is their moneymaker.)
Bumbershoot is a great blog if you are a 1980s home computer/console enjoyer, but were never quite sure how it all worked. He is trying to figure this out himself, so he goes step-by-step through getting his games working on a particular system.
So there are a lot of ASM 'deep dives' like this entry (which probably won't get too much traction.) My one complaint is he has a lot of content, but the blog is hard to navigate.
Calls to tech support are by accounting defintion. So that makes it easy to draw the line somewhere, and cut off groups of negative-value customers. Its 2026 and times are tough baby.
It's getting tough for shitters with some old ass legacy PC who depend on online services. Hopefully they were smart enough to understand they were living on borrowed time.
edit, also there are government subsided smartphones if you need one.
A bunch of the unsupported PCs aren't even that old.
I bought a Ryzen 5 1600X in 2017, which is noticeably higher performance than the basic tier of processors supported by windows 11, but it's not on the supported list, and you have to bypass the installer to get windows 11 running.
My PCs are modern. I (used to) run TurboTax in a VM. I've got three VMs with different older versions of Windows, that contain about 20 years of Tax data. It's more secure to keep my tax data in VMs that I don't use for anything else. I do have a Windows 11 partition on my PC, but I haven't booted it in over a year, and I have no need to.
I don't think I'll ever need to make a Windows 11 VM.
Cool, a super technical dude like you can just spin a secure Win11 VM to run TurboTax then. You probably have a bash script or something. What are you complaining about.
I mean, sure; you can come up with some kind of justification to call just about anything "a technical reason".
But there's no genuinely technical reason—one you don't have to twist yourself into pretzels over—that fairly ordinary software, working fine on Win11, would not work on Win10.
Easy question because you need to evaluate every dependency for Win10 compatibility, Win10 bugs that MS fixed in Win11, running unsupported Win10 CI somehow, QA testing team for Windows 10 (programmers won't do this)... and on and on.
All for an dead operating system. I guess this works in your basement mind where people work for free or something.
Some of those layoffs were certainly people supporting dead versions of Windows, and high-touch low-sophistication users with old broken-down computers. At some point, they/you were getting dropped as a customer and, checking the news, now is the time to do that.
(But most of these people were probably working on some Intuit Whatsit that you and I have never heard of. Every profitable software company has a bunch of products which failed to launch.)
Disclaimer that years ago, I was impressed at how slick the TurboTax website was.
So I'm surprised they even still have a desktop version (...presumably not just some electron wrapper). And given how it works, I'd guess most of your data isn't staying local for much of this.
Their website is pretty garbage IMO. Every single click is a spinner image for 1 second while the layout adjusts and fetches data. I’m not certain if this is a react or vue or whatever FE JavaScript thing but it’s extremely prevalent across the web and pretty much completely defeats the purpose of having a SPA design.
TT was/is old-style "slick", like at the time it put my bank to shame in terms of UI. It probably wasn't using a 'popular framework' and if it was, it wasn't a naive implementation. It also was/is optimized for desktop, while many financial corps now only care about mobile. So as of last April, it was still good enough for me.
Was it fast? No. Just fast enough. That's why I doubt the desktop app is really any different. They must have a bunch of API endpoints, and the 'slowness' is all on the backend.
Checked this on wikipedia, and MkLinux came out after they bought Next. ("The mach kernel company"). But obviously everyone in this space knew about Linux.
Scully and Gasse made the Macintosh II line successful by marketing expensive workstations to creative professionals. That was against Jobs' "vision" so of course he discounts it. One thing which has never changed: Apple won't lift their finger unless they get a 30% margin.
We probably don't disagree on much but nuanced details, which is why I said it was a "strange claim" instead of "incorrect".
Being a retro-head who lived through those days obsessively watching every twist and turn... with "strange claim" I was trying to convey it's a "commercial success" is a nuanced judgement on which reasonable people can disagree and any such absolute claims require clear definition of terms, scopes and time frames.
I think everyone knew the Macintosh was a technical success and "the future". But it was a commercial flop, and Steve Jobs got fired. So obviously he wan't happy about that.
(The Mac press back then loved to portray Jobs as some insane cocaine addict, and local gossip backed that up. Probably not in his biographies, but that would get you fired.)
The big issue with Wince was mobile IE was just an awful browser. I probably was not alone in wanting some 'webtop' gadget, but these weren't it. (In other words, iOS safari really was a killer app.)
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