Re: Mac users are feeling our pain :)

["Simon D. Williams" <email@ld8.org>]

A few points I'd contend:

The Mac was intended to be something very different from the Apple II
from day one (ie: a NEW platform)... expecting backwards compatibility
seems a bit much. The Apple II wasn't very backwards compatible with
the Apple I was it? OTOH The IIgs _was_ both backwards compatible with
the Apple II and enjoyed many of the benefits of the Mac (Colour, GUI,
HFS, AppleTalk, 3.5" drives etc), which doesn't really scream
"abandonment".

By the time the Apple II was discontinued it was well beyond obsolete
in a business sense as well as in a technological sense. I'd say it had
a pretty good run, but no corporation worth their salt would have kept
it alive artificially.

Steve Jobs got the boot in 1984, the Apple II was in production until
1993 so I don't think he's quite the villain he's popularly portrayed
as, unless you're going to claim that NeXT killed the Apple II ;-)

>If it's unethical for me to use REALbasic because of their abandonment of
>their original customers, then it's unethical of you to support Apple for
>it's abandonment of their original customers.

...and vice versa. This is a pretty sketchy argument... essentially
you're using someone else's lack of ethics to justify your own lack of
ethics, or to put it more pointedly: if you are going to use REALbasic
for Windows then you're long-standing Apple boycott is hypocritical.

Of course, if you really stick to your "principles" you'll soon find
that 99% of businesses really don't care about their
customers/workers/environment/human rights and then you'll just have to
opt out of consumer society altogether.
-s