Apple is known for dropping support and surprising customers. Granted, I don’t ever recall anyone including Apple claiming they support something they aren’t, but Apple has no better customer reputation than Microsoft.
They have occasionally announced some pretty short cutoff schedules, that is true.
> Granted, I don’t ever recall anyone including Apple claiming they support something they aren’t,...
That's precisely the issue here. Dropping support on the sly can only mean that Microsoft simply doesn't give a crap about supporting Win7 and Win8.1 according to their published schedule.
If Microsoft had announced, "Hey we changed our minds, you Win7 and Win8.1 users are going to lose support for some critical security fixes now, not when we said", that would at least be honest.
They didn't. Hence the problem.