Ever since Windows 7 I was able to get better performances on older PCs, Windows 8 made me resuscitate 6 years old machines, Windows 10 seems to improve it even more.
On the other hand my Macs are stuck on ancient Os releases, cannot install majority of apps, and slow as hell.
Ubuntu won't rejuvenate the same PCs as Windows does, unless LUbuntu is used.
So, can we tell Microsoft is doing s good job? Or is Apple cheating... à la Volkswagen?
Microsoft makes a lot more money on Windows than Apple does on OS X, so they spend more money improving it. A lot of that money comes from corporations with expensive, legacy software, so Microsoft has to maintain backward compatibility. That's a lot of extra work that Apple doesn't usually seem bothered to do.<p>Slimming an OS down as it gets older is also not something that's done quickly or cheaply. I also noticed that OS X became more and more bloated since Lion. Mavericks was the last really usable version to me, although I always did have to install a bunch of third-party tools to get the UI to behave in an efficient way.<p>I think you're totally right, but there are some people who have an almost religious, fact-free hatred of all Windows versions. I don't see too many OS X fanboy posts anymore, though.
There were significant performance improvements in windows 7 & 8. (Maybe 8.1 & 10 too)<p>You have to understand Mac controls their entire product chain. Each OS has always been more or less locked to similar era hardware. Windows has always had to deal with very, very weak and very, very strong hardware without knowing what that hardware is before hand.<p>So yes, Apple "cheats," by being both a hardware company and a software company. (Everything that made Microsoft scary in the 80s and 90s is now true about Apple).
The recently-released, Mac OS X 10.11, El Capitan, will run on systems up to eight years old [1]. Maybe it won't run well, particularly if the RAM is skimpy, but for any machine made in the current decade, it shouldn't be much of a problem.<p>If your Macs are "stuck on ancient OS releases," it's likely because you have ancient Macs, or you just aren't upgrading for some reason.<p>I don't really understand your Ubuntu comment, but if you really find OS X to be too much of a dog, you can install Linux variants on Apple hardware as well.<p>1: <a href="http://osxdaily.com/2015/06/09/os-x-el-capitan-system-requirements-compatible-mac/" rel="nofollow">http://osxdaily.com/2015/06/09/os-x-el-capitan-system-requir...</a>