The Costs of Supporting Legacy Hardware

The interesting IT news of last week is probably that the next Mac OS X version will drop support for some legacy hardware. Looking back at the history of Apple we see that this is not the first time, but that the company dropped support for old hardware quite regularly by changing the CPU architecture. This time it is different as the GPU is the reason for the drop of support.

This made me wonder what are actually the costs to support legacy hardware in KWin? While it is completely acceptable that new Windows versions and new Mac OS X versions do not run on legacy hardware, there seems to be the demand that free software has to support all kind of legacy hardware. So what does supporting legacy hardware cost for KWin?

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blo...gacy-hardware/

[nonamedotc]

Ah! Whenever I read about backward compatability and about support for older hardware, I have wondered about this. I would imagine businesses would prefer to have continued suppport for their systems. But then, based on what I see in the institution that I work with, I wonder if people do try to keep the odler hardware in place. Both hardware and software updates are carried out almost every six months.

I don't really think that support for old hardware is keeping the individual end users in mind ....