Comment by steve1977
1 day ago
Well, that's true. It's an interesting point actually. Windows certainly wins in terms of binary compatibility.
I was thinking more about the developer perspective, i.e. churn in terms of frameworks. Yes, PowerPC is gone. Intel will be gone soon.
But both the transitions from PowerPC to Intel as well as from Intel to ARM were pretty straightforward for developers if you were using Cocoa and not doing any assembly stuff.
Carbon only every was a bandaid to give devs some time for the transition to Cocoa.
Maybe I am a bit jaded, but with Apple's yearly OS release cycle — and breaking things nearly every time — I grew sick and tired of software I spent good money or relied on suddenly not working anymore.
Imagine taking your car in for an oil change annually and the radio stopped working when you got it back. It's incompatible with the new oil, they say. You'd be furious.
With the Windows of yore this wasn't so much of an issue — with 5-10 years between upgrade cycles — and service packs in between — you could space it out.
When you work in the computer industry, there tends to be a disconnect with how they are used in the real world by real people — as tools. People grow accustomed to their tools and expect them to be reliable as opposed to some ephemeral service.