They forgot to mention that the growing software library is also shrinking as they deprecate support for older OS versions and hardware. On the one hand they go to heroic lengths (fat binaries, Rosetta 2) to enable a migration to a new hardware platform but get bored in ~5 years and drop support.
"Growing software library" it ain't.
I don’t think dropping legacy support is due to boredom. It what allows them to keep moving forward without being saddled by every decision from the past.
How long should they have kept PPC or Classic support?
Microsoft is in a funny position. Backward compatibility is seen as a competitive advantage, especially in the enterprise market. However, it’s that very compatibility that makes people avoid adopting new technologies, because why bother? We see Microsoft throw so many things against the wall, and almost nothing sticks. Meanwhile, Apple tells devs to jump and they ask how high. Devs know Apple is going to cut support, so its update your apps or be left behind.
To really make a change, a person needs to be all-in. Dual booting Windows and Linux/macOS, for example. This is a sign a person isn’t all-in and they don’t really make the change, or it takes significantly longer. When a person goes all-in and burns the boats, they are forced to find new solutions and make the changes needed to make the new thing actually work.
The ARM chips in later iPhones and all M series Macs physically don’t have the hardware to run 32 bit software.
Should they still be supporting PPC software? 68K software? Why not old Apple // software for good measure?
Right now the last time I counted in 2012, there were 12 ways to define a string in Windows and you had to convert back and forth between them depending on which API you are calling. There are so many one off hacks to keep Windows running (see Raymond Chen’s blog) it’s a house of cards
Emulation has been a thing for a long time. It's not pretty and takes work to make it fast, but can be surprisingly stable.
It's wild to me that after many many decades with computers people are always surprised that the current hardware gets deprecated for new hardware and then rediscover emulation again.
And it takes resources, slower than native and lets developers lolligag about upgrading their apps.
I’m well aware of emulation parts of PPC MacOS - including the operating system was running 68K code until OS X came out 8 years after the PPC was introduced. Intel Macs ran PPC code under emulation for a few years.
So should the ARM Mac have emulations for Intel 32 bit/64 bit, PPC and 68K?
Should the iPhone have emulators?
I need to run Print Shop and Oregon Trail on my m-series iPad.
I think the use case is: I paid $200 bucks for professional a program 10 years ago that still works as intended. Why take it away from me?
It’s been half a century of Apple. At this point if FireWire, Flash, and a half dozen other things didn’t convince you that Apple deprecates then removes old functionality pretty rapidly I don’t know what to say.
Firewire (with a TB3->TB2->Firewire dongle chain) still worked up until macOS 26 Tahoe, when they finally dropped support completely. That's not too bad considering the last Mac with Firewire shipped in 2012.
(I still use a Firewire audio interface with my music studio Mac -- it runs macOS 12 Monterey)
If only those trillions of dollars of market cap and hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue could support...a couple dozen small teams maintaining legacy support. For the old hardware, pretty decent open source emulators exist that can run older versions, like all the way back to MacOS 7. It can't be that hard to keep the pilot light on for those old things.
It's a product choice. If you want long-term backwards compatibility, Windows is probably the best option, perhaps the Win32 API on Linux via WINE. Overall, backwards compatibility is a drag on future development. In general, I prefer to drop it myself unless that's the crucial feature. In this case, I'd say I'd make the same choice. Those last few bps of users can simply remain on old software/hardware.
You just can’t imagine my lost from not being able to use my 7 device deep SCSI chain including my Zip and Jaz drive