> Why do developers feel entitled to hardware devices that will always work with legacy code?
"Entitled" isn't really the word I would use there. It's not like developers throughout history have forced poor platform vendors to provide backwards compatibility at gunpoint. It's that most platform developers have provided backwards compatibility because doing so helps them attract developers. This has been true literally for fifty years -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360 for the first platform vendor to figure it out. Backwards compatibility is part of the work you do to convince people to use your platform over the alternatives. Omitting it can make developing your platform easier, but that ease comes at the cost of forcing you to work harder to convince people to get on board.
Apple's within their rights to decide they don't need to work hard to attract developers anymore, of course, but developers are every bit as much within their rights to decide to take their products elsewhere.
Whether it's smart business for Apple to decide they don't need to work hard to attract developers is another matter, of course. History suggests that is an attitude that eventually comes back to bite you. (Ask anyone at Microsoft, they can tell you alllllll about it.)
Why Microsoft as an example? They are pretty nuts about backward compatibility, including fixing other people bugs so their software would continue to run (the old SimCity bug). I believe I can still run Doom and, say, Ventura Publisher 3.0 on vanilla Windows 8 (although I'd prefer DOSBox, of course, at least for games).
It's true, MS cares more about back-compat than nearly anybody else. I was thinking there more of the "they'll use our platform whether they like it or not, because where else are they gonna go?" attitude that led to debacles like the Long IE6 Winter.
"Entitled" isn't really the word I would use there. It's not like developers throughout history have forced poor platform vendors to provide backwards compatibility at gunpoint. It's that most platform developers have provided backwards compatibility because doing so helps them attract developers. This has been true literally for fifty years -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360 for the first platform vendor to figure it out. Backwards compatibility is part of the work you do to convince people to use your platform over the alternatives. Omitting it can make developing your platform easier, but that ease comes at the cost of forcing you to work harder to convince people to get on board.
Apple's within their rights to decide they don't need to work hard to attract developers anymore, of course, but developers are every bit as much within their rights to decide to take their products elsewhere.
Whether it's smart business for Apple to decide they don't need to work hard to attract developers is another matter, of course. History suggests that is an attitude that eventually comes back to bite you. (Ask anyone at Microsoft, they can tell you alllllll about it.)