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0 pointsgeoffpado15y ago0 comments

Seems to me that putting giant efforts into things like Classic and Rosetta prolonged the ability for developers to move over before dropping legacy support. The other options would be:

a) support the legacy systems forever. b) don't support them at all.

Option A leads to a Windows-esque environment where support for older platforms actively holds back development and innovation for newer ones. Option B kills everyone's existing apps. Neither of those sounds like a very developer-friendly or even user-friendly option.

Frankly, the fact that they built those at all shows that they're willing to go the extra mile to make sure that their developers have the heads up to upgrade their applications before breaking them entirely.

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glhaynes15y ago

Developers are mostly irrelevant in this calculus to Apple: it's what the user sees that matters. They put out Classic and Rosetta not to help developers — they were with both very clear: the train is pulling out of the station, you'd better get on board with the new thing immediately or you're dead — but to help users have something to run on the new systems. Get users buying new systems, developers will follow... especially when essentially forced to.

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