[chungus_khan]

Leopard also got rid of Classic, which meant I just couldn't use it if I had wanted to at the time. At that point there had been a long-time legacy of backwards compatibility for the Macintosh, and I was in a position where I frequently needed to retrieve data in oddball formats from older Mac software. Tiger for Intel already didn't have it, and from that point forward Apple's attitude to backwards compatibility has seemed to be to operate at the minimum acceptable level.

[thatfrenchguy]

I mean, Tiger for Intel had a PPC emulator, that’s not “minimum acceptable level”.

[chungus_khan]

It absolutely was. Pretty much nobody would have been able to use Intel Macs at launch without Rosetta, because there was no software.

What I mean is that Apple used to actively support a very long legacy of backwards compatibility, and since the switch to Intel seems to only care about maintaining as much backwards compatibility as is strictly necessary for ordinary users to accept.