Snow Leopard still remains the company's crown achievement. 0 bloatware, 0 "mobile features on desktop" (wtf is this even a thing?), tuned for absolute speed and stability.
Ironically I can still run old 32-bit Windows software in Wine on my M1 Mac. Windows software is more stable on a Mac than Mac software.
And the hardware isn't a showstopper anyway. Apple did x86-64 on AS, Windows' WoW64 does x86-32 on ARM-32 or even IA-64, and I'll bet Windows will do x86-32 on x86-64 if Intel ever drops the 32 mode. Wine 32on64 will run x86-32 on AS already.
If you don’t think Windows is a bloated mess, look up all of the different ways you have to represent a “string” depending on the API you are calling.
Every bit of backwards compatibility increases the testing surface and the vulnerabilities. In fact, an early bug in Windows NT that you could encode DOS shell commands in the browser URL bar from a client and they wouod run with admin privileges if the server was running IIS.
Should Apple have also kept 68K emulation around? PPC?
In Windows they took things a bit too far by not only supporting old stuff but also treating it as first-class. If software is too outdated, it's fair to stick it behind some compat layer that makes it slower, as long as it still runs. But that's not even the biggest problem with Windows, it's Microsoft turning it into adware, also not being Unixlike in the first place.
To answer your last question, yes for PPC at least. 68K is too old to matter. Emulation layer doesn't need to hold back the entire system. If it means less dev resources to spend making glass effects and emojis, fine.
Yes? What kind of mercurial clown world do you live in, where you pay for software and then cheer when it's yoinked off your computer in an OTA update?
Even Windows users aren't whipped enough to lick their OEM's boot like that, Jesus. You'd hope Mac users would still have a spine; Apple doesn't maintain macOS as a charity, you're allowed to disagree with them.
- A 68K emulator
- A PPC emulator
- a 32 bit x86 emulator
- a 32 bit ARM emulator (since ARM chips don’t have hardware to run 32 bit code)
And to think that Windows is a shining example of good operating system design.
Why not include a 65C02 emulator also so you can run AppleWorks 3.0 from 1986?
However, I will absolutely say Windows users have higher expectations from Microsoft than what Mac customers demand from Apple. Macs would get removed by force from many of the places that rely on Windows in professional settings like render farms, factory automation, and defense. There is absolutely zero tolerance for Apple's shenanigans there, and Apple offers those customers no products to take their needs seriously, unlike Microsoft. It's not a coincidence that Apple has zero buy-in outside the consumer market, not a single professional customer wants what Apple is selling if Nvidia or AMD will do the same thing with less-petty software support. We all know why products like XServe failed, poor Apple had too much pride to support the software that the industry had actual demand for.
While we're talking about software darwinism, I think you need to hear this; Darwin objectively sucks from a systems design standpoint, it's why nobody uses XNU unless they're forced to. It's empirically slow, deliberately neutered for third-parties, the user-exposed runtime is loaded with outdated/unnecessary crap and BSD tooling that won't work with industry-standard software, the IPC model is not secure (fight me), the capabilities are arbitrarily changed per-OS, filesystem security is second-rate like Windows/Bitlocker, the default install is bloated with literal gigabytes of deadweight binaries, both LLB and iBoot are mandatory NSA slopware blobs, and their SDK commitment is more fickle than developers playing Musical Chairs.
None of these kernels are good, but XNU is unique in that it is completely disposable to humanity and possesses no remaining valuable features. If macOS stopped working tomorrow, there would be no disruption to any critical infrastructure around the world. If Linux or Windows had a Y2K moment, we'd be measuring the deaths by the thousands. I'm willing to give Apple their due, but you refuse to admit they're lazy - "since ARM chips don't have hardware" my ass, on "hacker" news of all places...
Consider how shitty the x86 Windows experience is compared to modern Macs - poor battery life, loud, slow and hot - I’m really surprised at how little Windows users expect from their computers.
As far as the Arm based Windows computers, the x86 emulator is slower than Macs running x86 code and the processors are worse.
And are you really saying ARM based Macs, iPhones and iPads are slow?
You seem to want the Mac to be the equivalent of the “HomerMobile”.
No professional is buying Macs? You think that video and audio professionals as well as developers are really saying “we really want Windows computers” or did I miss the “Year of the Linux desktop”?
Apple has had no such culture internally and they sure as heck don't emphasise backward compatibility to their customers (users or otherwise) - if anything, Apple prods and nags their developers to stick to the latest SDK/platform APIs, and shove the burden of software compatibility and maintenance onto them and hand wave away the breaking changes as being part and parcel of membership in the Apple ecosystem. This attitude can be traced back to the Steve Jobs era at Apple. It's definitely not new and comparing what Microsoft does with software and backward compatibility and expecting Apple to do the same is not fair - they really are different companies.
Web partially fixed this, but only by accident, because Apple isn't for the web. And if I cared at all about video games or were doing certain fields of work (maybe creative tools now that Apple even lost that hegemony), that'd take me off the Mac. Somehow the Mac 3P software scene is even worse now than in the PPC era. And Microsoft is now testing just how annoying Windows can be without people leaving, answer is a lot.
Apple is limiting their reach so much, for reasons I still can't rationalize. Some basic level of backwards compatibility or at least more stable APIs should be possible without sacrificing the good things. I've done some iPhone and Mac dev too, it sucks in every possible way, and I get why people trust it so little that they'd rather shoehorn a web app into a native shell.