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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, Apple has been here before with at least 2 architecture transitions under it's belt. Motorola 68000 -> PowerPC -> Intel -> Arm -So they have lived this "how do we bundle upgrades, cross architecture" for some time.

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I wonder, how many engineers with hands on experience on the PowerPC to intel transition are still around? I suspect Apple is benefitting from software layers and testing infrastructure, rather than institutional knowledge in this ARM transition. It’s just a guess though, I’d love to be corrected by someone with direct knowledge.

Bandwidth/Quota constrained people are by now a small minority of Mac users. Vocal but they don't define the market. I have yet to flood my disk, 6 macs down the line from Intel onward (I missed PowerPC) but its work. I help some people who own them for domestic use and I can understand their hesitancy to just let data happen.

They're probably benefitting more from the cross-platform architecture they inherited from NeXT than from anything from the pre-NeXT days. Though the fact the company had been through one architecture transition already probably influenced the decision to maintain the portability just in case (Mac OS X ran on x86 from the start).

I agree. Mac OS and Windows alike seem to have shifted towards being developed by people who don't grok the whole OS and the context for how it got to where it is today. Former engineers being promoted or retiring (often as young millionaires), the growing size of the timeline/code size & cross-pollination of ideas from other OSes.

I think the Windows platform could do with a re-write to be honest. The NT kernel is fantastic - just need to develop a new consumer OS atop it that can work with any device. (Maybe Rewrite it in Rust or Zig).

And maybe they will give us a GUI framework apart from HWND that will at-least last 5 years. Or integrate web standards right into the OS.

For other packages, this is where we start to see "We rewrote ______ in Go/Rust/blah" type articles. Nobody working on the product groks the entire code base, and rather than reading the "archaic" language, it is decided that it would be better to eliminate the tech debt and rewrite the entire thing in a language dejour so that "more" people will be familiar. This is usually followed by a series of releases fixing the bugs that were re-introduced because of all of the aha gotchas originally solved in that not understood archaic code base

Although I agree in part, usually new languages are brought in not just because they’re hyped, but because they provide better abstractions to deal with the complexity that made the original codebase unmaintainable.

That’s certainly the case with Go/Rust with respect to C/C++.

Don't forget x86 to x86_64 which was lighter e.g did not need things like Rosetta/Rosetta 2 but still involved several steps (userland, kernel, bootloader - IIRC in that order)

If I recall correctly, Apple went straight to 64 bits during the Intel transition. If they didn't, it wasn't long after so devs were still in the process of porting over to Intel anyway.

There are definitely Mac 32-bit Intel games on Steam, like Portal, that won't run on anything recent.

Apple switched to Intel with first generation Intel Core Solo/Duo which were 32 bit CPUs in mid 2006. Then later that year they released "late 2006" models using Core 2 CPUs which were 64 bit. However, they only has support for 32-bit EFI so they could not boot 64-bit OS.

https://everymac.com/mac-answers/snow-leopard-mac-os-x-faq/m...

I had a "Blackbook", it was definitely a 32 bit CPU (T2500).

Software-wise 64 bit userland processes were supported since Tiger (CLI and Cocoa only, Carbon UI stayed 32 bit) before the kernel itself moved to 64 bits in Snow Leopard (although IIRC not the default except on Xserve and Mac Pro, the two that could have loads of RAM. You could tell it to boot the 64 bit kernel through nvram boot args or something though)

A few Macs had a 64 bit CPU but a 32 bit only bootloader/firmware. That made them disqualified for one of the major OS version updates when it required a full 64 bit boot chain.

There were no online internet updates during the 68k to PPC or the PPC to Intel transition periods. Additionally, the 68k to PPC transition happened when Apple used a totally different OS, with a different application file format (hfs dual fork file, vs .app directory bundle).

I am not sure how much of that really applies here, this seems like a simple arithmetic bug.

There were online updates during the PPC to Intel era, even later versions of classic Mac OS (circa Mac OS 9) had some online update capabilities.

Why do people think that the late 1990s and early 2000s were some sort of times of computer barbarism?

Yes, the unwashed masses were just getting past the nerd factor of the Internet, but it wasn’t that bad for software distribution.

The experience of using a mobile phone, on the other hand, was brutal. If you wanted to get a new feature enabled on your device, you’d only be able to take it to a retail outlet of your phone provider.

My specific examples were (1) getting a firmware update on a Nokia 6188 to enable access to the 800 MHz band of the provider’s then-restructured CDMA network; and (2) same for a CDMA Blackberry to enable EVDO data.

Eg: http://www.arcxsites.shh.net/Nokia6188.htm

Yeah, and the mobile phone experience didn't really get any better for quite some time. I bought a Nokia N8 in 2010 while abroad, and I had to take it to a retail outlet afterwards to install a new keyboard layout for the on-screen keyboard.

> Additionally, the 68k to PPC transition happened when Apple used a totally different OS, with a different application file format (hfs dual fork file, vs .app directory bundle).

What? The 68k to PPC transition was from 1994 to 1998 (versions 7.1.2 to 8.1). The NeXTSTEP-derived Mac OS X (which uses .app bundles rather than resource forks) was released in 2001; though there were betas and developer releases as early as 1997, the OS transition is still distinct from the 68k to PPC transition and there were quite a few PPC-only releases of the pre-OS X Mac OS.

>"There were no online internet updates during the 68k to PPC or the PPC to Intel transition periods."

There certainly were during the PPC to Intel transition. This happened in 2005 with "Tiger", and at that time OS X had already been receiving updates over the Internet since quite some time.

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