The world turns backwards?

[The Former DMiller]

Well, I was thinking of things anecdotally. When we went from Apple IIe to Macs the Macs came with a card that allowed you to run Apple II software. That Mac lasted a few years and by the time we were ready to upgrade we didn't use the Apple II software anymore. I don't remember the transition from Motorolla's processor to the PowerPC because we had very little Mac software at that time and pretty much relied on what was pre-installed. The OS 9 to OS X transition was the big one for us since we literally have hundreds of software programs now, and most run on pre-OS X operating systems. Every single one of them that we still use runs on our computers with no noticable problems. On our end the transition was fairly easy. It's on the developers end, however, that I've read there have been problems.

The Apple IIe to Macintosh pissed off a lot of developers, and many who were already leaning towards PCs totally left Apple. Motorolla to PowerPC wasn't as bad as their was emulation to run pre-PPC programs on PPC Macs, but developers still had to do a little legwork so they were still pissed off. OS 9 to OS X was the easiest transition as Apple has been making things much easier for Apple developers with the development tools they provide for free. Developers still had work to do to move from OS 9 to OS X, and some of them took a few years to finally get their programs up to code, but almost all of them loved the transition because OS X is lightyears better than anything that came before it. This transition looks to be even easier as developers who have been using Apple's tools don't have to do much to get their programs to run on x86, and end-users won't notice a difference at all.

I think Apple and Steve Jobs have been thinking about this move for a while so they hopefully know what they are doing. You need to provide backwards compatibility for a few years, but there comes a point where only a small percentage of people will still need that backwards compatibility. I know I have never felt the need to use Apple II programs from over 20 years ago. Yeah there's a nostaligia factor for some of the games, but that's what emulation is for.