[hatcravat]

I'm not sure why you bring up Classic, Carbon, or PowerPC. Rosetta was dropped from Lion (two releases ago) and support for Classic was dropped when Rosetta was added. MS Office 2008 (I think it was) stopped working with OS X Lion (2011) because the installer executable contained PPC code. Not very many people need or expect 30 years of backwards compatibility. They just want more than 3.

[vor_]

> I'm not sure why you bring up Classic, Carbon, or PowerPC.

Because it's not true that Apple doesn't emphasize backwards compatibility. I also pointed out that once those technologies outlived their usefulness, they were no longer supported, and that there is indeed less backwards compatibility than Windows.

By the way, Office 2008 ran on Intel Macs. You're thinking of Office 2004, which was PowerPC only and ran for 7 years before OS X Lion dropped Rosetta.

[potatolicious]

How is this Apple's fault though?

Macs transitioned to x86 in 2005, with Apple repeatedly warning developers to GTFO of any PPC code they have ASAP. MS Office 2008 released years later still containing PPC binaries, and support from the OS was finally yanked in 2011, six years after the switchover.

This seems pretty reasonable. What is unreasonable is that MSFT continued shipping deprecated code as the newest and greatest, long after any reasonable update cycle.

To be fair to Microsoft, they weren't the only ones. App developers were warned for years since OSX's first release that Carbon was a transitional API that would be deprecated in favor of Cocoa. This was in 2001. Adobe steadfastly refused to update, and in 2007 Apple stripped 64-bit support from Carbon-based apps as a beating stick to get major developers like Adobe moving. It worked.

From everything I've seen developing both OSX and iOS apps, Apple gives plenty of notice between deprecating functionality and actual removal of binary support (from the above examples, six years).

Compare with my days developing Windows software, where developers knew well that Microsoft had zero teeth behind API deprecations, and will shamelessly keep using it for eternity, making future backwards compatibility efforts ever more painful - you will find code written in 2008 that uses functionality deprecated in the late 90s!

[vor_]

Actually, Office 2008 ran on Intel Macs. It was Office 2004 that was PowerPC only, which as you state was supported for several years.

[iclelland]

He didn't say that Office 2008 didn't run on Intel -- he said that it ran on PPC, which it did. 2004 was PPC-only, 2008 was a universal binary, and 2011 is Intel-only

[msbarnett]

Apple licensed Rosetta on a per-install basis from Transitive Corp.

Then, IBM bought Transitive and discontinued the PPC->Intel translation engine.

Apple did not have the option to continue shipping Rosetta, because IBM axed the team that would have had to update it for Lion.

[vor_]

That very well may have been a factor. However, Apple engineers have publicly stated that for them to continue supporting PowerPC Macs would have required developing and shipping system APIs targeting a processor they hadn't sold in over half a decade. I think Rosetta's number was up regardless.

[msbarnett]

I think that would only make sense if they wanted to allow people writing new software targeting the PPC to be written, using new APIs.

To support only applications that existed prior to the Intel switch, they wouldn't need to back-port new APIs.