Comment by bigyabai
2 months ago
> Even if Rosetta wasn't being removed, everyone should still want native ARM software
I think this is seriously flawed logic, and part of why I don't daily a Mac anymore. As a user, I have zero leverage in porting 90% of the stuff I own to the New Hotness. Yes, that includes video games. But it also includes BBEdit and Sublime and Git Tower and dozens of other Mac apps I paid for and can't easily use anymore. That is insulting - I should be allowed to use these apps if the hardware supports it. No software nanny should have the right to tell me playtime is over.
There's no point paying for premium software that my laptop OEM uses as leverage against their own developers. I'm not going to be complicit in it even if emulation "harms" the performance. It's not unviable for Apple to implement UEFI, take Rosetta seriously or hell, even support Windows. They are a trillion dollar company, Apple could launch a satellite into fucking orbit if you gave them enough time. They simply don't want to.
> But it also includes BBEdit and Sublime and Git Tower and dozens of other Mac apps I paid for and can't easily use anymore.
Those apps all run on current Macs today--but you do need to upgrade to a current version.
Nobody should expect BBEdit 6.5 that shipped on PPC Macs in the early 2000s to run on a M4 MacBook Air.
> It's not unviable for Apple to implement UEFI, take Rosetta seriously, or, hell, even support Windows.
Apple stated it during the PPC to Intel transition and again with the Intel to ARM transition: Rosetta is a bridge technology for developers until they ship native versions of their applications. It's not a long-term solution.
Microsoft could make a deal to run ARM-based Windows on Apple Silicon hardware if they wanted to.
> They are a trillion-dollar company; Apple could launch a satellite into fucking orbit if you gave them enough time. They simply don't want to.
You're arguing against yourself: obviously, Apple's market cap is $4.16 trillion and has shipped over 400 million Macs since its introduction; it's hard to argue their strategy is "wrong" and hasn't been wildly successful.
No successful modern company has been declared dead or beleaguered more times than Apple has.
I'm confused by the first half of your first point - I understand frustration at Apple's constant "throw it out and move on" attitude, but if that did not exist I would still want software to be compiled for the CPU I'm using where possible. It's why I download amd64 instead of x86 binaries on Windows, and run CachyOS built for x86-64 v3 on my Zen 3 PC.
The second half I agree with. Apple has "their vision" of what computing should be, and you need to be ride or die with that vision. Including application deprecation, unrepairable hardware, and artificial locks to make sure you're not misbehaving. That doesn't work for a lot of people, and was something I had to accept when I bought a Macbook after a decade away from the ecosystem (it helps that I now have an army of ThinkPads, a homelab, and a gaming PC.) But if you don't want to pay lots of money to visit Apple Disneyland on their terms, no one can reasonably blame you.
Sadly, Microsoft has enshittified Windows to the point that I jumped off - that 30 year backwards compatibility isn't worth the spying and advertising (LTSC helps, but not enough) and the Linux/BSD world expect binaries to be recompiled to the point that people joke that Win32 via WINE is the Linux stable ABI.
Everything has trade offs or things that benefit the business much more than the users.