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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Everyone here is very positive that the transition will go smoothly based on their last few transitions being fairly successful.

I'm a bit more skeptical.

Back then, their desktop/laptop business line was much more important to them. They needed it to go well. They were also a niche player and couldn't afford to lose more market share to PCs/Windows.

But now, they barely care about their desktop/laptop revenue (being only 10% of their revenue) and they don't seem to care much about their marketshare either because they don't seem to be doing much to expand it. They care a lot more about their iDevices now.

Also, if the transition from 32 to 64 bit is any indication, they don't care nearly as much about backwards compatibility as they used to. When they did the hardware transitions, they had a compatibility layer (Rosetta) that was supported for 5 years after the transition. But with the 32 bit change, the announced that it would no longer be supported in 2017, and dropped support in 2019, just 2 years later.

I can no longer use a lot of my favorite apps because they were games written years ago with no current support, so they were not updated. Or they're things like the old Microsoft Office, which works perfectly well for me, but I can no longer run. And Apple provided no emulation environment or official way to do so.

So now my choice is to keep an old computer around just to run old apps (which could be a security issue if it's on the network), or buy something like Parallels, which is a ton of overhead for a single app at a time.

It would have been nice if they had provided a Rosetta for the 32/64 conversion. The fact that they didn't does not bode will for this transition.

View on HN

Also, if the transition from 32 to 64 bit is any indication, they don't care nearly as much about backwards compatibility as they used to. When they did the hardware transitions, they had a compatibility layer (Rosetta) that was supported for 5 years after the transition. But with the 32 bit change, the announced that it would no longer be supported in 2017, and dropped support in 2019, just 2 years later

Apple hasn’t sold at 32 bit only Mac since 2007. To Adobe’s chagrin they didn’t port Carbon to 64 bit with the rest of MacOS in 2007 and they deprecated it in 2012. Were developers really caught off guard that they shouldn’t be writing 32 bit software in 2017?

>> Were developers really caught off guard that they shouldn’t be writing 32 bit software in 2017?

Probably not, but end users shouldn't have to suffer because they bought software from bad developers. One reason why IE still ships with Windows is because a lot of companies are still using old enterprise software that never got updated for the modern web.

Have you read Raymond Chen's MS blog about all of the hacks that are in Windows just to keep backwards compatibility with one bad app? Maintaining backwards compatibility forever increases the security vulnerability to footprint, the testing surface for regressions, code size etc. Have you seen how badly Windows runs in low resource environments like the low end Surface line?

IE and the collapse of MS's browser market share is not exactly a shining example of how to successfully handle a product.

You’re sort of picking the worst example, the alternate is the fact that Windows has maintained a gargantuan desktop OS market share for decades in large part because of their dedication to application compatibility.

Having an overwhelmingly market share in a declining low profit margin business is the definition of a Pyrrhic victory.

No one cares about PCs as a business anymore.

>> No one cares about PCs as a business anymore.

Is that true? While I get that this isn't scientific proof, there seem to be a lot of Youtubers out there making a decent living off videos of building and reviewing PCs and Macs.

Linus Tech Tips has >11M subscribers, Dave2D has 2.7M subscribers, etc.

Have you looked at the profits of every single PC maker? It’s a low margin business.

Making money off of YT videos is peanuts in the grand scheme of things.

> Making money off of YT videos is peanuts in the grand scheme of things.

You said "No one cares about PCs as a business anymore."

The popularity of YT videos on new laptops, pcs, etc. seems to suggest that at a non-zero number of people (i.e., greater than "No one") still care about PCs.

If you want to be pedantic - a few Youtube videos as a business as evidence of a thriving market is about like showing a record store selling vinyl as evidence of a resurgence.

Those channels have millions of subscribers and even more views. Maybe it's insignificant in your view, and that's fine.

YouTube is tiny. Even the largest YouTube star will struggle to get noticed in public.

I lump together "PCs are doomed" in the same category as "Apple is doomed".

Both are not even remotely true.

PCs aren’t doomed no more than Android devices. They are just both a low margin commoditized product that compete on price.

Being a low margin business does not equate to no one cares about PC business any more.

From a business standpoint, IBM abandoned it years ago and HP has gone back and forth between whether it wants to keep their PC unit for years.

Almost all of Apple’s former competitors are either dead or worth nothing. From a business standpoint, Apple’s strategy seemed to have been the right one. Apple probably makes more on computer sells than any one else and they only make up 10% of Apple’s revenue.

So HN posters can complain about Apple’s strategy until the cows come home, but the market has decided it was the right one.

I didn't say there were not any tradeoffs made to support those users with legacy systems.

What do you define as a low end Surface line on x86? I have a Surface Pro 1 that I still use to this day. I also have a GPD Win handheld that's running an Atom processor that is surprisingly good for what it is. I also have some older Atom based stick PCs that are pretty bad (only 2GB RAM), but those are designed for signage and kiosks, for which they are... adequate.

I see you are ignoring the low cost Surface computers that are meant to compete on price with the $329 10.2 inch iPad or even the $499 iPad Air.

The iPads can actually run well with 2GB of RAM. Microsoft Office is a much better experience on an iPad without a keyboard than any hardware that Apple sells.

The Atom-based Surfaces with the Atom x7-8700 - that's the same processor I have in my GPD-Win. It's more than usable for light users. Heck, its built-in GPU outperforms the one in my Surface Pro.

While x86 Surface (not-pro) might have been "meant" to compete on price with iPads, I don't think that's how it worked out. I tend to think most of the people who will buy a low end x86 Surface want/need Windows in the first place. It's not a substitute for an iPad.

Have you compared the performance of the atom based Surface to the cheapest iPad?

That's an apples and oranges test, and the performance difference doesn't matter. They're for different target markets.

I don't think anyone in their right mind considers a Surface as an alternative to an iPad. Just because they have similar form factors doesn't mean they're substitutes for one another.

The things I run on my atom based handheld are only available on Windows.

So the target market is people who want a really slow more expensive tablet with a horrible interface for touch?

Microsoft’s own products run better on the low end iPad than the low end Surface. On top of that, the interface is better for touch.

And Microsoft sells less Surfaces than Apple sells Macs, let alone iPads. This isn’t really saying much about the Windows being backwards compatible for ever (what started this thread) was a great strategy.

https://investorplace.com/2018/10/surface-sales-propel-micro...

IE is not a good example. As someone who had to support legacy C++ bloat for years, I thought Apple’s move was a good one.

This is ridiculous. Mac revenue was roughly $25 BILLION dollars in 2019. The idea that they don't care about it is simply wrong. Same with the idea that they don't care about marketshare.

Of course they care more about iDevices than the Mac. It brings in roughly 5x as much money as the Mac. But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time.

25 billion is still only 10% of their revenue. And they won't lose it all by making it a shitty transition. Heck, they won't lose most of it. But if they lose 20% of their revenue because of a bad transition, that's still only 2% of the total company revenue. Why would the spend money on protecting that 2%?

If the money they need to spend is less than that 2%, why WOULDN'T they spend the money?

The overhead of hiring people. The overhead of managing an extra team. The overhead of extra QA. The overhead of triaging extra bugs.

There are a lot of costs associated with backwards compatibility with very little payoff if it doesn't mean a lot to the bottom line.

Sure. Note that 2% of $25B is $500M.

Companies of all sizes (even FAAMNG) will act to protect that kind of existing revenue.

And my point was that you can do all of the things you listed for less than $500M; probably for less than $250M. Developers are more expensive than they used to be but $100M+ still goes a pretty long way.

Because the Mac and iDevices revenue streams are not as independent as you imply.

Driving the Mac off a cliff would alienate developers and have serious repercussions on the iOS ecosystem as well.

Why do you think Apple still builds Pro apps like Logic and FCP ? They are almost certainly losing money given their ridiculously low price point, but they help with brand image and keeping the Mac the go-to platform for creatives. There’s indirect value in that.

I mentioned this above—I feel like Apple's pro apps are highly analogous to what happened to the Mac. That doesn't portend a bright future.

Apple killed Shake, which was an industry standard at one point. They killed Aperture, which lots of photographers loved. They replaced Final Cut Pro 7 with a much more limited Final Cut X, and seeded lots of ground to Adobe in the process.

There's also OS X Server, although there's a strong argument to be made it wouldn't have survived in the modern world anyway, and Apple just saw the writing on the wall.

Logic does seem to have done consistently fine, at least, so that's something.

Logic pissed off a lot of composers with the lack of 32-bit AUs in newer versions. The few producers I know who love Logic aren't upgrading to Catalina and are already considering switching to Windows.

> Apple killed Shake, which was an industry standard at one point.

Sure, and this might be skewed by hindsight because they did make new releases for a handful of years, but it was an acquahire to develop Aperture and other color tools for Final Cut Pro. Small shops use After Effects on Windows, medium shops used Shake on Windows, and large shops used Shake in Linux. Because of hardware costs you'll be very hard-pressed to get medium or large shops to use macOS.

I also don't see Apple investing/competing with the big transitions that happened in CG over the next 5 years; 64bit, 4k/8k, and stereo. Apple had special deals where they offered Shake's source code when it was discontinued and a few studios clung on and tried valiantly to accommodate [1]

[1] https://www.studiodaily.com/2008/07/delivering-8k-vfx-shots-...

Driving the Mac off a cliff would alienate developers and have serious repercussions on the iOS ecosystem as well.

For iOS Developers, I am not so sure. If Apple came out with Xcode for Windows at WWDC, I'm pretty sure a lot of iOS developers would be overjoyed. Now, a build farm is much easier among other advantages.

Another possibility: Xcode for iPadOS.

Apple is terrible at making XCode good, useable software on their own platform. I can't imagine what a nightmare it would be on Windows.

Xcode for Windows would quickly end up like all software Apple makes for Windows: buggy, slow, lagging, and unloved. Not that it is much better as it is on Mac...

I think a large part of their crappy Windows software was there need to make it look like the Macintosh version. I get the feeling if they are putting Xcode on Windows, they will not feel the need to make it anything but a Windows app.

I would also imagine they would remove anything having to do with the Macintosh except perhaps the Catalyst compiles which should decrease some of the neglect problems causing bugs.

> Driving the Mac off a cliff would alienate developer

How many, though, and would they really switch to Windows or Linux, or retire from the industry?

Apple has always — or at least since 1984 — had an incredibly loyal fanbase. I think that the sort of slights which would make me leave a platform just roll of their collective back.

Since they released their 2016 lineup there has been a shift from Macs to Linux and Windows (just look at how many "I left macOS for {X}" have been published here on HN)

Windows is also making a very compelling argument with WSL2

there has been a shift from Macs to Linux and Windows

As far as I can see the Mac market share hasn't shifted in the last few years. I wouldn't take too much notice of a handful of people whinging on HN.

A tiny vocal minority doesn’t mean much, if anything, in the overall scheme of things. The tiny vocal minorities of various tech/niche/geek sites rarely means anything.

You can’t extrapolate from that. No less when it’s not even correct for general trends most of the time.

This was my argument for why Apple shouldn't have killed Aperture. Sure, it was a tiny percentage of Apple's business, but it was beloved by customers and independently profitable—more profitable than plenty of entire businesses.

Apple still killed it.

Yup.

Apple is the best (large org) at marshaling resources, focus, priorities, pushing the envelope. It's been fantastic.

But every decision has consequences. They abandon beloved products. They deprioritorize code quality.

I wish they'd find a better balance, or clever new org strategies. Spinoff abandoned products. A separate cleanup crew to address technical debt, fix bugs. (I'm sure there's plenty of other devs, like me, who revel in house cleaning.)

Man, Aperture was really good, and I loved the fact that if you bought it from the Mac App store, you got to install it on up to 5 computers, which was a bigger deal back then than it is now.

I never understood why they killed that but kept Filemaker. I guess they really did think the update to Photos was good enough.

Filemaker is different, it's not an Apple product anymore. Claris was spun off into a separate company.

I think Claris are still owned by Apple though?

Nope, they were fully spun off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claris

> But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time.

I don't know, look how long it took for Apple to finally replace the damn keyboards.

>But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time.

No. Look at MS and the difference in quality. They are both samey in the $$$ department, but MS much larger focus and enormous dev base makes it not such a nice thing for products. Apple reduced scope is what lets them have quality thing. They do not have much manpower (I mean, they are one of the few trillion dollar company, their human resources don't look like that), spreading focus would harm quality. Their iDevices makes 5x as much money, that's where their eyes are, that focus can't be made smaller for an "infirior product" money-wise.

Even back in 2006, there were at least 7-8 different ways to define a string on Windows depending on which API you were using.

You may have missed GP's point. Microsoft is casts a very wide net, running on a huge array of hardware and trying to do everything from mobile to console gaming to datacenter servers. The dev experience is equally diverse: you don't even need a Windows box to develop for Windows.

Apple jettisoned all of that diversity to refine a few precious use cases to earn that "quality" aura.

I think this move to ARM is signaling a couple more use cases being tossed to the curb, like beefy workstations and PC gaming.

How is that “wide net” working out?

- Microsoft is a non starter in mobile

- trying to run Windows on low end Surfaces is painful

- Windows is horrible as a touch first interface.

- even with Azure there are more Linux VMs than Windows.

-it takes literally years and multiple failures every time that MS tries to release a new version of Windows.

- They finally through in the towel when it came to IE and was forced to use a competitors engine.

MS is not exactly the shining example of how to successfully pivot as technology changes.

MS was on mobile before mobile was mobile (pun intended), and part of the issue was probably that they got in the game so early that, by the time tech was actually mature, they were out of gas. Ballmer thought he'd seen it all, and he had not; when he realized, they panicked and reacted like headless chickens. It's a cautionary tale for the ages, but it could have easily gone the other way around.

On the other hand, they entered the game-console game very late but still had a pretty good run. They entered the cloud game similarly late but they're now killing it. They won the Browser War I and would have likely done it again in BWII, were they not forced to behave by authorities.

So it's not like they cannot execute, or like they are fundamentally impeded by their fundamental structure. They can smash it with the best of them, when the lead is focused.

I agree with the thrust of your post but I want to nitpick one thing:

> They won the Browser War I and would have likely done it again in BWII, were they not forced to behave by authorities.

Rephrased: Microsoft won Browser War I by using illegal tactics, and lost Browser War II because authorities made them stop using illegal tactics. IE/Edge was always a bad product, and its success was due to external factors.

That said, Microsoft has lots of resources and I don't doubt they could have made a good browser. By extension, I don't see Chromium Edge as a loss for Microsoft so much as an informed decision to throw in the towel. How does Microsoft benefit from spending millions of dollars on a custom rendering engine, when Google gives Chromium away for free? Microsoft can fully rebrand it, and put in their own ads, tracking, and default search engines. From my vantage point, Microsoft just saved an enormous amount of money and lost very little.

There was nothing in the justice department ruling that forced them to stand still when it came to browser development. Apple moves faster with Safari/WebKit after they started with KHTML. Apple wasn’t exactly a large company when they introduced Safari.

They also lost billions of dollars on the console market. Is it even as profitable as the AirPods now?

As far as getting in mobile too early. Failing at the Newton didn’t exactly hurt Apple getting back into mobile. You do remember that Apple was almost bankrupt in the 90s?

Apple was able to port OS X to the iPhone partially because it didn’t have all of the bloat of Windows.

I developed on WinCE devices using both .Net CF and C++/MFC. I am very much aware of the limitations.

> There was nothing in the justice department ruling

Between that and the EU ruling that forced them to implement the somewhat-silly browser-choice system, it was a "hostile environment" where the political message was fairly clear. Combined with a situation where IE was effectively dominant, it sapped any appetite to take it forward or take risks with it.

> Is [the console market] even as profitable as the AirPods now?

That is not the point, the point is that they pivoted just fine when they wanted to. They even had something genuinely novel with the gesture-tracking system. And how could they not? Windows and Office are a license to print money, even today.

> Failing at the Newton didn’t exactly hurt Apple

That was 1 device. Microsoft and their partners tried tons of different iterations of formats, some that didn't even exist at the time (kindles, book-like, palm-like - I had an HP that, without a stylus, looks now like a thick iPhone, but was produced in 2003)... but screen tech and cellular bandwidth simply were not good enough at the time.

I'm not talking of exhaustion because of financial losses (Microsoft was printing money, they could have done the same 10 times over), but of a shared weariness for the effort. At one point they basically gave up. I believe the famous Ballmer snark on the iPhone announcement was sincere, in the typically-disdainous way of his: Ballmer thought he had seen it all and this was just one more, nothing to write home about. They had failed so many times in the space that they had lost faith in the possibility of success.

There was no browser choice in the US and I believe it lost its lead here first.

like beefy workstations

If that was true they wouldn't have released the Mac Pro.

Action speaks louder than Words.They only acted when the sales number or Data shows. And that was already too late. That is not caring by old Apple's Standard.

Apple sells roughly 18-20M Mac per year. According to their own words more than 50% of these are completely new to the Mac platform. ( And most of them are form China ) You would have expected 9-10M new Active Users every year if no one was leaving the platform. Instead from 2014 to 2018, during that 5 years they managed to add 20M. ( Genuine Question, Did anyone notice there are less Mac users in US? ) There are also 20M registered developers, which adds to the bottom-line of Mac. What used to be annual Active User number reporting stopped in 2019. And even stopped mentioning satisfactory rate of Mac. Mac Pro was done not because they cared, but because a few closely connected real professional customers threaten to leave the platform before they took action. ( And many left before they notice )

It is like in a marriage when your partner keeps telling others in public how he/she loves you. But did not show any care or action during that time. For years He/She dont even talk to you or notice you. You try talking to him/her about having problems but he/she completely ignore you. One day you publicly file for divorce and He/She rushed out and tell others how much he/she cares and are working on it. That is not caring, it is called saving faces.

> When they did the hardware transitions, they had a compatibility layer (Rosetta) that was supported for 5 years after the transition. But with the 32 bit change, the announced that it would no longer be supported in 2017, and dropped support in 2019, just 2 years later.

You are comparing the time a technology was supported with the time it was announced a technology would no longer be supported. 32-bit apps were supported in 64-bit Mac OS systems for at least 7 years.

From what I could find, the first announcement of dropping support for 32 bit apps was in 2017, and the support dropped in 2019. Why would an app maker update their old apps before an announcement was made that they would be deprecated?

> Why would an app maker update their old apps before an announcement was made that they would be deprecated?

Almost immediately after 64-bit support was added in 2005, it was the recommended path, not only for new apps but for existing ones to migrate to. For example, an document called "64-bit Transition Guide for Cocoa" [1] was first published in 2007. A few years later, another document [2] was more explicit:

> Should You Recompile Your Software as a 64-Bit Executable?

> As a general rule, in OS X v10.7 and later, the answer is probably yes.

OS X 10.7 was released in 2011.

Certainly, many – most – app makers did update their old apps. For example, Apple's refusal to support Carbon on 64-bit famously forced Adobe to scramble to update their apps to run on Cocoa, because they considered 64-bit support to be essential. Admittedly, one of the chief benefits of 64-bit was the ability to address more than 4GB of memory, and pro apps needed that more than your average app. But your average app was also easier to recompile, so in practice, pro apps were if anything the slowest to migrate. Even then, most of them did, long before the official deprecation.

By the time the deprecation was announced, let alone by the time Catalina was released, most apps that were still 32-bit were the ones that had ceased to receive updates altogether. From that perspective, the exact timing of the deprecation doesn't matter that much: most unmaintained apps aren't going to become maintained again because of an announcement by Apple. It was going to hurt no matter what.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...

So then why were there so many 32 bit apps? 2005 is, what, a year after the Intel transition? Surely not all of those apps were written during that one year.

Not to mention, for better or worse, games in particular were 32bit through 2018 at least. I imagine this must have had something to do with cross platform compatibility, although I can't imagine what.

> Not to mention, for better or worse, games in particular were 32bit through 2018 at least. I imagine this must have had something to do with cross platform compatibility, although I can't imagine what.

Well, here are the Steam Hardware Survey results from some random date in 2014:

http://web.archive.org/web/20140318083854/https://store.stea...

If you click on "Windows Version", you can see that a substantial percentage (~20%) were running 32-bit versions of Windows, which can't run 64-bit applications. Most of those were likely on 64-bit processors, but had 32-bit Windows installed anyway for whatever reason; IIRC that might include driver support and not needing as much RAM. So game developers were forced to ship 32-bit binaries if they wanted to target those users. (They could ship both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, but that's relatively difficult on Windows; there's no equivalent of Mac "fat binaries". And there wasn't much point.)

That's Windows, not macOS. But then as now, game developers targeting PC primarily cared about Windows, with macOS as an afterthought at best. If the Windows version was built as 32-bit, the macOS version likely would be too for simplicity's sake.

There's also game consoles to consider. PlayStation and Xbox both switched to 64-bit in 2013, so most games released from then on would have to at least have 64-bit-clean codebases (even if they weren't tested specifically on 64-bit PCs). But earlier games might well not be 64-bit clean; the kind of low-level hacks that make porting to 64-bit difficult are probably more common in game codebases than your average app.

While you are talking about games, it's relevant to remember that Unity had different licenses for their 32 and 64 bits engines just up to a few years ago. I think the free license was 32 bits only, what locked a lot of people in it.

> So then why were there so many 32 bit apps?

Were there? On iOS, I lost access to a lot of games due to the 32 to 64 transition. On Mac OS, nothing I used was impacted. If your app wasn't 64 bit, it was abandonware. Even the abandonware that I actually use, like Gitbox, was already 64 bit.

> Were there?

Yes, lots! I won't go through all the individual 32 bit apps I use because it's idiosyncratic, but this has been a major complaint about Catalina, aside from the OS's general buggyness.

And that's why in 2006 they introduced Macbook Pros which were 32-bit only?

If you want to switch to 64-bit, you don't introduce machines that cannot do that, that need their 32-bit ABI and have to be supported for years to follow.

Apple didn’t really have a choice. The choice required a fairly decent amount of legacy support for the next decade or so; I doubt they really wanted to commit to that if they didn’t have to.

This to me says one of two things:

1. Either their engineering org is so bad they can't afford to spend some of their massive resources on backwards compatibility.

2. They just don't give a shit.

Either way, not a great look.

What engineering organization would prefer to support an architecture for the next 10 years because they had to use that chip for two?

Of course, they did have a choice:

1. Wait a few months, Core 2 Duo was on it's way. Previous Nehalem generation did support 64-bit, so obviously, the next Core Duo SKUs with 64-bit support were on the way. This way, they could skip x86 ABI entirely.

It's not like Apple doesn't have long periods without updates of specific models.

2. If they really had to release a model that introduces 32-bit ABI, they could support it properly.

So by doing it the way they did it, I have to agree with Jasper_. The only difference with his conclusion is, that in my opinion they just took the option 2.

Easy with 20/20 hindsight, but back then Apple didn't know it would be a few months. Should Intel have had unforeseen trouble with the Core 2 and decided to delay the release they would not be releasing any hardware. Also, availability of enough processors and ease of porting existing 32-bits x86 Windows software could have been factors.

Sure, easy with hindsight.

But they did take that option and now refuse to pay the price. They are forcing paying the price on their users now.

They got additional benefit at the time, if I remember correctly: Adobe suite was 32-bit + Carbon; so having 32-bit x86 ABI allowed to them and to Adobe to have the suite running natively on the new CPUs, buying Adobe time to port to 64-bit and Cocoa, and axe Carbon without waiting to axe Intel entirely.

Given the benefits they got, they should be called for not wanting to pay the price.

32 bit Carbon was deprecated in 2012. Did it really take a rocket scientist to know that you shouldn’t be writing 32 bit software in 2017? 10 years after the last 32 bit Mac shipped?

You keep on repeating that devs are stupid because they only coded their apps in 32-bit.

Perhaps you need to be more charitable and try to find the reasons why devs and businesses chose to only support 32-bit.

Well. Business that don’t keep up with technology get left behind. I have no sympathy for developers who sat on their hands for a decade.

So enlighten us with those reasons why these devs and businesses chose to only support 32-bit. Other than they would find it cheaper to do nothing while Apple and the users pick up the tab, of course.

>> their last few transitions being fairly successful.

Their last transition is specifically what brought me to the Mac after having been away for a decade.

I switched to Mac exactly because they were going x86, because I knew I'd be able to virtualize Windows (although it took a year to happen), which was a win-win for me. I'm guessing a lot of people who used Windows at work plus developers on Linux wanting a nice GUI (remember, we're talking mid to late 2000s) were responsible for a lot of Mac growth back then.

I have to wonder how many people will switch back if x86 were to get totally abandoned.

Honestly, I don't think that many will.

Back then Mac software support wasn't nearly as good as it is now - I think Apple is in a much better position to drop x86 support.

> Back then Mac software support wasn't nearly as good as it is now

It might be a chicken and egg thing though. With the influx of people who wanted Macs on x86 and the halo effect of them spreading the word, the app support got much better.

Also, because the machines were x86 compatible, I'm sure a lot of enterprise buyers like IBM started to allow their users to get Macs instead of Windows laptops.

I obviously have no idea what will happen, but as someone who switched back to Windows a few years ago, I am definitely curious to see how it plays out.

Out of curiosity, what lead you to switch back?

The early 2011 15" MBP fiasco. Long story short, the logic boards had a design defect that caused them to fail from overheating. By the time Apple decided to address the issue and do a recall, Applecare had lapsed for many owners, who had already disposed of their computers.

I had my logic board replaced under AppleCare and it had the same issues within a few months.

I managed to keep my bricked MBP long enough for the recall, but the board (which I guess had the same defect) still eventually died (same for a friend of mine with the same model).

That laptop wasn't cheap, and is the only laptop I've ever had that died. I've had a lot of Mac and Windows laptops since the mid-90s (first was a Powerbook with a trackball).

So needless to say, while Apple has the rep of having the best customer service, there are exceptions, and I was unlucky enough to fall under one of those exceptions, and I will probably never go back again.

Having said that, when I switched back to Windows, it wasn't nearly as bad as I had remembered it, and has gotten better since. I only miss a couple of things from Mac, and the biggest one is iMovie.

I will likely switch back. I'm not an avid gamer but there are a couple of titles I really care about - and I'm pretty sure at least one of them will never make whichever transition Apple will impose, having only barely survived the 32bit massacre.

The last few years have really felt like enduring Apple more than enjoying it. It's a shame, because OSX remains great, but there is only so much it can compensate for.

Including 64-bit support until Catalina was effectively the same as Rosetta: support for deprecated tech. A Rosetta for 64-bit is just kicking the can.

Right but my point is they only did that for two years, instead of five.

The writing was on the wall for a decade. And most applications did get an update.

The difference, to me, is that Rosetta was an inherently bad experience for users. The apps ran slower and used more battery, because despite Apple's best efforts, it was still an emulator, and emulators are slow.

The amd64 architecture, by contrast, innately supports i386 code—that's a key feature of the platform! Removing support from macOS does not benefit users; it only benefits Apple by lowering Apple's maintenance burden.

Given that Apple is one of the richest companies in the world, and they sell Mac hardware at a large markup, I'm not particularly sympathetic to their plight.

The selling point of iDevices is that so much content/code works perfectly on them, and that is because it is created on the OSX platform originally. If Apple think they can maintain that experience for customers while developers flock to WSL or Linux they are kidding themselves.

Can confirm a lot of developers seem to be going to WSL lately, including myself.

> It would have been nice if they had provided a Rosetta for the 32/64 conversion.

Until 32 bit support was dropped, the system supported running 32 bit apps and drivers. What kind of ‘Rosetta’ are you looking for?

32/64 isn’t a good analogy because the only reason Apple supported 32 for so long was because Intel missed their deadline for core two duo which led cause the first generation core duos to be 32 only.

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