Re: macOS support

[Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@gmail.com>]

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> On Mar 26, 2018, at 14:41, Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm not a big fan of Apple either, but do use it (primarily because employers are more willing to support/allow Apple than Linux and I just can't do windows, so lesser of two evils really). 
> 
> However, I have upgraded my old mac mini to High Sierra with no problems. I can't remember when I actually purchased it, but from vague memory, it originally came with mountain lion, so that would be 10.8
> 
> I believe 10.12/10.13 are supposed to be supported on all mac mini, imac and macbooks from 2009 models onwards.  My macmini is slow, but it was always slow. I do run Emacs on it.

The good thing about Apple hardware is that it is very robust. I still have 15+ years old PPC machines that work flawlessly. If there is a need to draw a line in the sand somewhere it should either be the OS version that first supported intel/32bits *only* or the one that first supported intel/64bits *only*. I'm not sure which is which though.

(@Tim: if you need some speed, think of changing your hard disk to an SSD disk, my 2011 MBP has rejuvenated a way that I never though possible thank to that.)

Jean-Christophe 

> 
> Tim
> 
> P.S. I also will be putting Debian on my Mini at the end of this year. 
> 
> 
> On 26 March 2018 at 13:14, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca <mailto:monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>> wrote:
> > Generally speaking Emacs and other GNU projects shouldn't bother supporting
> > platforms that are no longer supported by their original issuers.
> 
> While I agree with this, by and large, there can be good reasons not to
> follow this rule when we disagree with the issuers.
> 
> > For example, starting in 2014 we no longer needed to bother to support
> > IRIX, because SGI no longer supported IRIX.
> 
> This a good example: I think SGI made a pretty good effort of supporting
> IRIX for as long as it could make sense, so I'm fine with dropping IRIX
> support at the same time as SGI.
> 
> > As I understand it, Apple itself supports only the last three or four macOS
> > versions.
> 
> Note that the issue is not really software support but hardware support:
> Apple is pretty aggressive about dropping support for old hardware in
> its newer OSes.  They could make OSX 10.11 work on my old macmini but
> decided it would be counterproductive for their business.


Jean-Christophe Helary
-----------------------------------------------
http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune



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