When is reasonable to stop supporting a platform that only hinders the user experience? Should they have supported PPC emulation forever? x86 is on the way out in for most consumer devices. Apple is usually a bit early to drop technologies, but still acknowledges and fixes real mistakes (USB-C-only laptops and the associated keyboards) when they impact customer experience.
> When is reasonable to stop supporting a platform that only hinders the user experience?
When people who care about it can carry on the torch.
Dropping support wouldn't matter if anyone outside of Apple could keep it alive instead, or if Rosetta 2 users could stay on the last supported OS and keep their devices secured through community patches etc.
> USB-C-only laptops
I think it's hilarious that Apple managed to get criticised for being both too early AND too late with USB-C.
To be fair, they were criticized a lot for dropping the 30-pin connector and going to Lightning too. At the time they said they designed Lightning to last 10 years (about how long 30-pin lasted), because they knew how disruptive a port change is with all the accessories people have. It lasted from 2012-2023, 11 years. So they made good on their promise.
"Promise" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, this whole theory is extrapolated entirely from a single remark during the iPhone 5 introduction in 2012, "this connector is a modern connector for the next decade".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4gC4Z-fx5k&t=1571s
The only other time they referred to replacing Lightning was when Joswiak said "obviously we’ll have to comply, we have no choice.".
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/26/23423977/iphone-usb-c-eu...
> Should they have supported PPC emulation forever
Yes.
Linux hasn't even bothered continuing supporting processors in the same family, dropping support for 386:
* https://www.zdnet.com/article/good-bye-386-linux-to-drop-sup...
and more recently, 486:
* https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-devs-start...
and here we are expecting support for completely different CPU classes. :)
Supporting very old hardwares and supporting less than a decade old softwares are two very different things.
Supporting everything forever is how you end up with Windows
Here I was thinking the problem with Windows was the dog-slow RAM hogs the team replaced most of the core applications with so they could serve web ads in the launcher and OS chrome. Silly me, the real problem with Windows is that it can run old apps if you still have the exe kicking around.
Windows did not even support Final Fantasy 7 between two versions due to their broken Direct X design. Let's bury that turkey; just because there are compelling blog posts doesn't mean they are a legitimate reflection of Microsoft.
As a customer I expect my software to work, permanently. Don't expect me to cry for the richest companies in the world.
Windows has many flaws, being able to run any binary made in the past 30 years is not one of them.
They had the classic environment. They could have kept that going.
Business decision, pure and simple. Value added and risk of people not moving forward was not worth the cost to them. They were also way smaller at the time than today, though the iPod had taken off.
I’m fine with them eventually dropping support for things. Some things I think they do too early.
Microsoft HAS to keep supporting stuff forever. That’s their bread and butter. Line of business apps. If they drop support businesses lose THE reason to stay with them.
It’s far less of an issue for Apple. And people do leave because of it. But not enough. It’s also one of the reasons (of many) they’re not very popular in business.
> They had the classic environment. They could have kept that going.
Not for long. The Classic environment depended on the system having a PowerPC CPU - it would not have run on Intel systems. (Rosetta translation would not have been applicable.)
I know it didn’t last long. But why do you say Rosetta wouldn’t have worked?
For essentially the same reason that Rosetta 2 can't be used to run Windows - they're userspace JIT translators, not system-level emulators. The Classic Environment was, for all intents and purposes, an entire virtualized PowerPC system running Mac OS 9, and allowed software running inside it to do some pretty wild things like patching system "trap" routines, writing graphics directly to the framebuffer, or even setting breakpoints in and handling exceptions from other applications.
The Classic environment depended on the system having a PowerPC CPU.
You think the worst thing about windows is one ofnthe best things about windows?
Not really, Apple was doing something right at that point they got almost everything from classic to OSX, ppc to Intel, from 32bit to 64bit, x86 to ARM.
I used it through all of that and really at no point was it feeling forced and the only one with real friction was classic mode the rest felt seamless.
They must have just been doing something right with dev relations and community.
Although I will say now a lot of people don’t seem to care with keeping up with far less extreme random iOS hurdles.
You mean, being able to run binaries from 25 years ago? Yes, please!
Apple moved ahead with thunderbolt five should they keep thunderbolt four? Moving to thunderbolt five is necessary if you want to drive more information to a 5K or 6k monitor or any other peripheral.
> x86 is on the way out in for most consumer devices.
Define "consumer devices"? I am holding on to my AMD Ryzen machines until they literally fall dead. I have no complaints from them. Maybe some modern or even next-gen ARM CPUs will be even better on Linux but I don't think we are quite there yet.
x86_64 is here to stay for a long time still.
But maybe you literally meant x86 as in the 32-bit CPU arch? If so, I'd mostly agree but not quite; they could be used in low-power micro-PCs for a long time still as well.