[dahauns]

Sounds to me more like the ported programs were short lived - and IMO, in that they are not entirely wrong.

Sure, Carbon and Rosetta certainly were no mean feat, and the drastic PPC/x86 break is something Microsoft never really had to deal with (heh, the biggest problem trying to run a PPC/MIPS/Alpha based NT application today is actually finding one :) ).

But Apple never went to the same lengths as Microsoft regarding backwards compatibility, and while Carbon and Rosetta immensely eased the transition, the continuity definitely wasn't comparable and it was never transparent to the developers (and in Apple's defense, this was never their intention and they always were quite open about it.)

For one, Rosetta (and thus PPC compatibility) was dropped with Lion in 2011, so no amount of Carbon would help 10.1 applications after that.

And even with Rosetta, each release, especially after Tiger, came with quite a list of API changes and deprecations (with the whole of Carbon declared obsolete in 2012) - and and increasingly longer list of high-profile software that would not run anymore and require an update or upgrade. And while Microsoft did a lot even to prevent and/or work around issues with notorious software (hello Adobe! :) ), Apple was far less willing to do so.

I mean, just as an example - I can run Photoshop 6.0 (from 2000) on Windows 10 (certainly no thanks to Adobe), but no chance for PS 7.0 even on Leopard...

[scarface74]

Carbon was declared obsolete in 2012 but wasn’t discontinued until 2019.

Porting from PPC to x86 was relatively easy. But you’re also forgetting about the first transition - from 68K to PPC.

Can you run the PPC version of any Windows NT apps?

[cptskippy]

PPC to x86 possibly the smoothest transition I've seen in my lifetime, for most it was just a recompile, and I'm convinced it was only as smooth as it was because of the shit show transition to OS X.

Apple announced it's plans to move to OS X in 1997 and that they'd ship an emulator, Blue Box, to run classic apps. That was met with a resounding "no" from the community.

Carbon was never suppose to exist, the Classic APIs were not memory safe, don't support thread, and had a lot of other issues. Apple wanted a clean break in the form of Cocoa but the community said no. So Apple came up with Carbon, which was sort of a port of Classic APIs to OS X, but because the two operating systems were so different it wasn't anywhere close to a 1:1 copy and required developers to port to it.

Since it's inception, Apple wanted Carbon dead, it required them to rewrite core parts of OpenStep in C and they had to maintain them alongside their Obj-C equivalents. It took them 12 years to get to the point where they felt comfortable killing it off and almost 20 years before they actually could.

> Can you run the PPC version of any Windows NT apps?

Developing for PPC was much like targeting x86 and PPC on a OS X. It was mostly a recompile unless the App used assembly. You can't run the PPC version of an NT app on modern hardware just as you can't run the PPC version of an OSX app on MacOS.

The difference thought is that PPC on NT never took off so there's something like 4 or 5 Apps for NT versus the thousands or hundreds of thousands for OSX.

[dahauns]

I haven't forgotten anything, I just fail to see the relevance to this discussion. (68k? Really? That one's been dead for 14 years. And what is with you and NT on PPC? You really want to start comparing a 25 year old, short-lived, ultra-niche side version no one bought or even wrote software for with the "mainline"?)

I think you missed the entire point of my posting, i.e. that even outside the architecture changes long term compatibility was never even near the same level (and different arch often not even the culprit). Carbon being available doesn't help you a thing when old software still doesn't work.

[scarface74]

If you are complaining that you can’t run 25 year old Mac software on an x86 Mac, the only option is for Apple to ship MacOS with a 68K emulator and a PPC emulator. The first version of MacOS that ran natively on x86 came out in 2006.

Yes I realize that PPC Macs came out in 1994. But they required a 68K emulator because even parts of MacOS were 68K.

[dahauns]

>If you are complaining that you can’t run 25 year old Mac software on an x86 Mac

But I ain't. I'm arguing that for vast stretches of Mac OS/OS X/macOS history, even 5 year old software has been a gamble.

[scarface74]

There were a few breaking change epics in MacOS history.

There were three major breaking changes for MacOS.

- If you bought the x86 version of software in 2006. It would potentially work until 2019 when Apple dropped 32 support.

- If you bought the first first version of OS X PPC software in 2001, it could potentially run until July 2011 with the release of 10.7.

- If you bought a classic MacOS app, it could run from pessimistically from 1992 with the release of System 7 to 2006 with the introduction of the first x86 Macs.

[dahauns]

Yes, we already talked about this. The keyword here is "potentially", which I'd swap with "theoretically".