Re: Yet no updates for many working apples
I thought Apple pulled Safari for Windows back in version 5, anyway?
Microsoft's failure with Vista in regard to drivers wasn't necessarily the driver model not being supported (vendors don't really have a choice in that matter,) but that Microsoft kept letting the release date slip so few vendors were willing to invest in drivers for the release. ISTR reading that a lot of the native Vista drivers in the RTM release were Vista-wrapped XP drivers.
Later on I found that a lot of x64 drivers were interchangeable between XP x64 and Vista x64. And so far as that goes, even Windows 7 has limited support for some XP video drivers, which allows older systems (laptops running 845s, etc.) to have at least functional video which doesn't prevent the system from going to sleep. Just no Aero. Darn.
Anyway, yes, XP is a cooked goose. Not that it isn't a capable stable operating system in its current form, but in my experience Windows 7 is a much more capable (and compatible) OS on all hardware I throw at it. I appreciate there are some instances where moving to 7 is impossible -- Trevor Pott lamented in an article today about a CNC machine, and I have seen a couple of old plotters running an XP-based controller.
I see this a similar to back in the mass movement to 2000 and XP with older systems which could not run anything newer than Windows 98 or NT. Eventually those systems were replaced as they broke down beyond repair or newer replacements were offered off-lease or otherwise less expensively, but in the meantime special policies and rules were put into place for those machines. Granted, the threatscape has changed drastically since then, so more special provisions need to be taken.
Heck, if the coming Windows 8.1 update does indeed fix up the UI, it may wind up installed on my six year-old Latitude D430.