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Comment by gxs | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs mentioned in interviews what a hell of a job his teams did in the initial change to x86 and the immense work it required.

I wonder what he'd say in this scenario. Not saying "Steve Jobs would have NEVER allowed this apple is going to shit", simply wondering if the effort required to move to x86 should be essentially discarded (depending on the implementation)

Edit: I agree with the replies, they are a good reminder to me of the sunk cost fallacy

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In the x86 transition, Apple was discarding the previous effort which had been required to move from 680x0 to PowerPC, and that seems to have been the correct choice.

The effort to move to x86 has paid off tenfold already in the ~10 years since the transition. They now need another effort to sustain the Mac, or whatever comes next, for another 10 years.

It's also worth noting that the OS they migrated was not the one that ran on the bulk of the old ppc system but a relatively new Unix fork that at least at the time was pretty possix compliant.

Which is to say, they have experience migrating an entire platform to a different architecture. Not many companies have that background.

Honestly I think Jobs would’ve been all for dropping x86. They also derived an immense amount of value from the effort to move to x86, so it’s not like it was wasted.

>>> They also derived an immense amount of value from the effort to move to x86, so it’s not like it was wasted.

That's a good point and a reminder to me of the sunk cost fallacy.

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