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?