No, but there's a reason we've moved on from that. Again, don't upgrade if your games are that important to you.
That's not really a response is it? It's part of the responsibilities of an os manufacturer to provide backward compatibility for their users or to EXPLICITLY declare that compatibilities they are breaking before getting that hard earned money from the user. $19.99 for what is essentially a service pack (no, notes and reminders don't cut it as an upgrade) might seem not that much but factor in say (modestly) 1/3 of the user base upgrading (20 mil macs) and it's $400,000,000 for apple. Does anyone here (anyone with any sense that is) think mountain lion justifies such a dev. cost? For what? Airplay? For staying a darwin kernel behind ios?
I don't really like ms, but that guy you have in your avatar (yeah I think he is a bozo too, but that's not the point) has made sure his company still supports windows xp, and games that run in windows 20 years ago can still run in windows. Windows 7 is also much much faster than vista, and faster than xp despite requiring more resources in some cases. It's thus extending the life of the computers it's being used on. Actually windows 7 extends the life of any intel mac it's going to be installed on and is much, much faster than lion. And that's not because new os's require newer hardware (that's a bunch of horse manure by anyone claiming this), because at the end of the day lion has brought a couple or so fancy ui tricks (versions), it's because unlike apple ms has been maintaining and optimizing their os, while apple hasn't.
Completely opposite of OS X. Core duo support has been dropped and most macs that used to fly on sl run like a dog on lion. And they are still going to be running like a dog in ml too. Because ml has done nothing to be a sl type release and optimize things in os x, it's just slap on features and some bug fixes, and maybe a tweak here and there to make up for lion's problems.
Let's put things in perspective boys, just cause we are in an apple forum doesn't mean we are all fanbois here, or we leave our judgement behind as soon as we start posting and reading at mr....
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Not true.
First of all, the actual champion of backwards compatibility is Sun.
Second, Apple actually does give a damn about this stuff. The problem is that many, many developers depend on stuff that is never specified to be stable. And then when that changes, their apps break and they cry.
This is why on iOS, they actively reject apps that use private frameworks. I believe very few apps on iOS don't work in a newer version. Sure they probably exist where they depend on behaviour that is actually a bug, but there are relatively a lot fewer than on Mac.
Basically the only things on Mac OS X that consistently break are system tweaks. But stuff that only uses published APIs tends to work for a long time. For example, Filemaker Pro 5.5, made for Mac OS X 10.0, runs absolutely fine on 10.6.8. That's six releases of OSX and not even on the same hardware platform. (It's a PPC-only app though, so Lion finally kills it.)
Remind sun's commercial os and it's installed user base please? Just cause we can't say that ms have been doing one thing very well, we have to find another example? Yes ms has by far the best legacy support and it dwarfs apple there.
I am not aware of the technical details you mention, but as a not so well informed outsider to actual development, may I ask why are they specified to not be stable to begin with? Are there alternatives to use other than the non stable counterparts? Because if not then their hands are tied I guess. And where do games fit in all that? In any case a virtualised sl mode won't be some kind of technical fit for apple to achieve, why are they not offering this option? God knows with just a 1/3 of the mac user base upgrading they can afford 400,000,000 in development. I am not sure ms will even make that money with $30 licenses to oems for a brand new os, and what with their own os still running perfectly well on older pcs and not being the dog that lion is on older macs.