Could be. But today's news is, "new mac pros do not support Windows 7." Not, "Apple no longer supports Windows 7 on any macs."
First, for folks in the market for a new Mac Pro class machine there isn't much of a material difference between those two.
All I can react to is what I know to be true today.
what is true today is not just this specific action but a history of actions Apple has made with respect to Bootcamp's Window support over time.
With Lion/Mountain Lion
"...You can use Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, Microsoft Windows 7 Professional, or Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate with Boot Camp 4.0. Windows XP and Windows Vista are not supported with Boot Camp 4.0. ..."
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4818?viewlocale=en_US
Sure it is true most of the 2013 Mac line up supports Windows 64 bit in bootcmap. But 32 bit Win 7 ? Nope. XP nope. When XP was dropped was it as large or larger than Win 7's curren't percentage? That too is a known if factored into the equation.
The notion Apple dropping support for Win 7 is not whether they are going to or not. It is going to happen at some point (just like most PC vendors and Microsoft are going to factor in on future hardware at some point. Tag it to a very specific point in time? No. Ballpark? yes. Because Apple is largely predictable. Apple doesn't often randomly change strategy and tactics.
That sounds like a really complex way of saying "4".
It sounds like a really straightforward way of saying that you are at least 2 if not 4 orders of magnitude off on scope of the issue.
If 1% of 9K folks complain about something then will have 90 complaints. That is one reason why Macrumors moves this issue to the front page. The impact is large enough to get a long thread going ( which means they'll get paid with ad views. ).
If the impact was on the order of magnitude you suggest it never would have made the front page.
People are complaining because Apple is going to desupport windows 7 and that windows 8 sucks.
It isn't really a conjunction. Some folks complain at any mention of Win 8 being a viable solution. Given that it has a substantially larger base than all deployed and active Macs ....
Apple is going to not going to support Window 7 on future Mac hardware over time. So are most PC vendors over probably a longer time. It is kind of hard to label this 'desupport" since it was never officially supported on the Mac Pro 2013 in the first place. Can't remove support that never was put into place.
Talk about barking up the wrong tree. For all of those who are bent out of shape, send an email to
Satya.Nadella@microsoft.com. Microsoft's crappy products are Microsoft's problem, not Apple's.
It is not Microsoft's job to support proprietary hardware. MS supports mainstream PC market components. The common CPUs , GPUs , IOHUb, USB controllers , etc. but it isn't actually MS job to write drivers for everyone's hardware.
Supporting the boot process is a system vendor issue; not Microsoft's.
This largely isn't about whether the core basic components of Windows run. They do. It is far more about whether custom Apple drivers are around for a specific OS version.
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