2008/11/24 Ted Gould <ted@...11...>
On Mon, 2008-11-24 at 14:18 -0800, Jon A. Cruz wrote:
No, machines that customers did not shell out extra money to get the latest and greatest OS.
Hmm, you're going to have a hard time generating sympathy there. I'm fine with people buying proprietary software, but realize you're on the treadmill that your vendor puts you on.
no actually hes not. theres an awful lot of people out there who dont a choice but to be 'on a treadmill' and theres also a large portion who wouldnt even realise they've chosen a treadmill. Add to that the fact that the treadmill your discussing still offers a better customer interface for most things than the alternatives, even if you are running the 4 yr old version and I have no problem with us trying to maintain support for it.
Going into this past summer, some reasonable estimates had 10.5 only hitting 30% adoption, with 10.4 still holding about 60%.
Remember, the upgrade cycle is a little different than Linux, since one actually has to pony up cash to move forward.
Also businesses are a large factor. I'd done some research for work and it turns out that a lot of businesses are not upgrading to 10.5, so for anything targeting the enterprise support for 10.4 was a must.
Remember that we're talking about "building" not running. XCode 3.1 can build binaries for 10.3. We're not limiting people from running, just building. I imagine all of those businesses have one machine running 10.5 to do a build on.