It's actually kind of impressive how much transitional stuff Apple has introduced and then removed with Mac OS X and how right many of their decisions turned out. I guess Cocoa itself was an extension of the legacy NextStep API too. They also had Classic for running old Mac apps directly in OSX and later Rosetta for running PowerPC binaries on Intel (I guess the same tech was used for the 32->64 bit transition). So many technologies have been smoothly deprecated and removed over the years by Apple.
I don’t think you really can compare Apple’s and Microsoft’s situation here. Think of the extreme bigger amount of software that was written for Windows including all that custom made business software for small companies. Apple was always in the situation that a lot of their 3rd party developers were also „fans“, who are more willing to keep up with their transitions, where however most the Microsoft tech developers were just doing their job and want to keep their stuff only running with the least amount of work necessary.
Sure they do. It’s on mobile. While MS isn’t going anywhere in the Enterprise, anyone who is focused on the desktop when it comes to MS development instead of web, cloud, or even cross platform mobile development is headed down a dead end.
If we want to be pedantic, a desktop could be considered mobile too since you can pick it up.
But in the real world when people talk about “mobile software” everyone knows that people are talking about iOS and Android. No one is chasing after the Windows software market, it’s been a diminishing platform for the past decade.
In the real world people are working on laptops, while using iOS and Android mostly to consume content, play games, browse web and show plane tickets.
When they actually become a match to laptops and 2-1 convertibles, maybe.
And there Chromebooks are no where to be seen outside US school system, iPad Pros are mostly a gimmick in rich countries and Android 2-1 are basically phone apps with keyboard.
Yes and no. They've taken down the documentation, but there's still a number of (non-GUI, non-kernel) Carbon APIs that are still not deprecated (as of 10.11, at least), and still allowed in the Mac App Store.
I'm using AHGotoPage() because NSHelpManager has no equivalent and nobody has been able to explain to me how to make that class do a similar task reliably. (In hindsight, AppleHelp is such a disaster that I should have just avoided it entirely, as almost every other app does.) MAS reviewers have given me grief over many things my app does, but never any Carbon calls.
The last time I saw any Carbon APIs deprecated was 10.8, I think (6 years ago).