With closed source IP, every bit of support, from bug fixes, to feature requests, to compatibility fixes to integrate with newer mainline/foundational tooling, costs money.
With open source projects (and in particular ones like Linux where there's a huge number of contributors and interested parties), support for would-be niche facilities can keep going as long as there's someone with the knowledge and spare time to do it.
With that said, kernel maintainers have recently indicated that some unused subsystems are likely to be removed soon, as AI is now finding (real) security vulnerabilities in them that nobody is willing to fix.
Looking through Apple’s financial statements, they theoretically could support these old systems. I’m not saying a cut doesn ’t make sense, but just that economics-wise they could keep one guy for it
IIRC, that could exist for MacOS in the form of Darwin.
And that increasingly gets difficult to do. i386 support went down the drain in the kernel in 2012, i486 is probably going down the drain as well this year [1] and soon-ish another bunch of really really old stuff will go as well because it isn't maintained [2] - good luck finding someone still running IPX networks or ISDN hardware.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/06/patch_to_end_i486_sup...
These arguments fall apart when you remember that Apple has several trillion dollars at hand. It's not some shoestring startup.
I'm mostly okay cleaning out a lot of legacy and unsupported devices. In some ways, and for people who want to support really old hardware it may not be great, but they're most likely stuck on older versions for other reasons.
I disagree. They are dropping support because nobody is maintaining them. There may very well be people still using these features, but they haven't been motivated or aren't properly skilled to offer to maintain them going forward, and haven't motivated some other skilled person via payments.
Rather, the core difference is that Apple does not offer a way to have external people take over providing support.
Support for 486 is another thing, but, frankly speaking, running a modern Linux kernel on a 486 makes no sense, either form a practical or preservationist / museum perspective.
Because I noticed my old Core 2 Quad PC with Nvidia 8600GT that my parents use as their email and Facebook machine, doesn't boot with any linux newer than Kernel 6.1 even though I can get Windows 11 to boot on it.
So the myth around "Linux is great for old PCs", highly depends on what HW you have.
But by modifying it right? Because the core 2 does not support SSE4.2
Supporting old hardware and software has a substantial cost that only grows exponentially. Companies exist to print money, not to cater to the smallest niches.
It would be great if they could support things, but I most definitely understand why they don't.
I actually wouldn't expect macOS to support actual floppy drives since the OS's list of supported devices doesn't include any that shipped with floppy drives. The fact that I cannot install the latest macOS on any devices older than 2019 is a related, but separate problem.
This is very different from legacy PC floppy drive controllers which spoke a completely different protocol, which was very complex and full of footguns
Legacy floppy controllers also had various legacy features almost nobody used, like soft deletion of sectors (IBM added this in the 70s for use with primitive database systems), or attaching tape drives using the floppy interface (nowadays if you buy a brand new tape drive, the interface options are SAS or Fibre Channel)
> There are still some people who need to run 32-bit applications that cannot be updated; the solution he has been pushing people toward is to run a 32-bit user space on a 64-bit kernel. This is a good solution for memory-constrained systems; switching to 32-bit halves the memory usage of the system. Since, on most systems, almost all memory is used by user space, running a 64-bit kernel has a relatively small cost. Please, he asked, do not run 32-bit kernels on 64-bit processors.
You are deluding yourself if you think open source folks are better. You can't compile and run a modern version of GCC on Solaris 10 on SPARC, for example. And we just had a story here last week about removal of bus mouse support. It's only a mild exaggeration to say that lots of folks will check the commit activity on github and of a project doesn't have commits this week it should be banned from the internet and the universe.
Then you have the problem that many dev tools are not forward compatible. CMake is a huge issue. An ubuntu system from 2020 has CMake on it, but it won't compile anything that uses CMake that was released in recent years because the cmakefiles are incompatible.
Bus mouse support isn't removed because it's old but because it's been broken since 2015 and nobody noticed.