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dpkonofa | 1 year ago
I would consider myself an Apple evangelist, for the most part, and even I can recognize what's been lost by Apple breaking backwards compatibility every time they need to shift direction. While the philosophy is great for making sure that things are modern and maintained, there is definitely a non-insignificant amount of value that is lost, even just historically but also in general, by the paradigm of constantly moving forward without regard for maintaining compatibility with the past.
scarface_74|1 year ago
They could have stuck with x86 I guess. But was moving to ARM really a bad idea?
They were able to remove entire sections of the processor by getting rid of 32 bit code and saving memory and storage by not having 32 bit and 64 bit code running at the same time. When 32 bit code ran it had to load 32 bit version of the shared linked library and 64 bit code had to have its own versions.
dpkonofa|1 year ago
No, including an interpreter like they did (Rosetta) was an alternative. The "alternative" really depends on what the goals were. For Apple, their goal is modern software and hardware that works together. That's antithetical to backwards compatibility.
>They could have stuck with x86 I guess. But was moving to ARM really a bad idea?
I don't think I ever suggested that it was or that they couldn't have...
>They were able to remove entire sections of the processor by getting rid of 32 bit code and saving memory and storage by not having 32 bit and 64 bit code running at the same time.
Yes, and, in doing so, they killed any software that wasn't created for a 64-bit system. Again, for even a purely historical perspective, the amount of software that didn't survive each of the instanced transitions is non-negligible. Steam now has an entire library of old Mac games that can't run on modern systems anymore because of the abandonment of 32-bit without any consideration for backwards compatibility. Yes, there are emulators and apps like Wine and CrossOver than can somewhat get these things working again but there's also a whole subsection of software that just doesn't work anymore. Again, that's just a byproduct of Apple's focus on modern codebases that are currently maintained but it's still a general detriment that so much useable software was simply lost immediately because of these changes when there could have been some focus on maintaining compatibility.
BuyMyBitcoins|1 year ago