Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

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There is always business value to support and backwards compatibility. Think of how much goodwill Microsoft has built up for their backwards compatibility. Heck, the story of the version of Doom that runs on DOS->Win3.1->Windows 10 hit the front page today! Now think of how little goodwill Google has, due to their pernicious habit of killing off popular products that don't meet their very high standards for revenue production.

Why does Microsoft dominate the enterprise and not Google? I think the above has almost everything to do with it.

Apple has kind of walked the middle road between Microsoft's extreme backward compatibility and Google's "kill off everything that doesn't earn at least a billion". They support old hardware a lot longer than Google, but they also break a lot of things with their OS updates. Apple also has a pretty legendary track record of successfully shifting CPU architectures without breaking popular apps at the time, something that's pretty much unheard of elsewhere.

>Apple also has a pretty legendary track record of successfully shifting CPU architectures without breaking popular apps at the time, something that's pretty much unheard of elsewhere

Which other SW/HW companies have switched CPU architecture? I am not sure there is a point of comparison here, and there has only been 1 case so far, the M1 is upcoming and we don't know yet how well that will work.

Linux works pretty well with client qemu specified as the architecture handler for non-native binaries too :)

Only one case so far? Apple has taken the Mac from Motorola 68000-series chips to PowerPC to Intel x86 and now to the ARM-based M1. That’s 4 different architecture in less than 4 decades.

I mentioned M1 and specifically excluded it since it is unreleased. Is that fully released such that I can buy it right now? Apple site says 17th Nov. Can't know if it breaks things until it is released.

I also said 'architecture change' so by your count that would be 2. But Rosetta was only for PowerPC to x86 wasn't it? There seems to have been emulation for the 68x chips but was it seamless without breaking anything?

I mean any company could change architecture but rely on a customer using an emulator that isn't really not breaking things.

So by my count, 1, but if I am wrong and the 68x translation was equally as seamless and breakless than 2.

But to say it was unheard of you need to reference all the other companies that transitioned architecture and broke stuff. I can't think of another general computing supplier who did that but I might be wrong - can you give an example?

> Which other SW/HW companies have switched CPU architecture?

There's also Palm, which successfully switched from Motorola 68000 to ARM, without breaking popular apps at the time.

Nice thanks, wasn't aware of that.

To me while it's nice, it's not an impossible achievement and often likely uses somebody else's code to get there :)

I think apple receive far too much praise for things they've done which are often not as amazing as they seem and too little praise for other things (e.g. their great work on the 5nm SoC hw) as well as far too little criticism for biz practices.

Trying to set things a little more on an even keel :)

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