[twoodfin]

I’m sure there were organizational, business, and technical failures, too, but it seems to me like Apple’s disastrous ~decade attempting to put the Macintosh on a modern foundation was primarily a product failure.

They wanted to do the right thing and synchronize the OS kernel switchover with the PowerPC transition, but chose to pursue a radical software compatibility break alongside the hardware swap.

When that failed for what should have been predictable reasons, they had no choice but to fall back to a pure emulation strategy with no OS architectural changes, and the opportunity to put the MacOS on a new path was lost.