Apple ahead of schedule 3131
I only own two, and rarely use them.
But consider this: I didn't own a Mac during the OS 8-OS 9 period. I bought all software for my Mac *after* OS X's release. A couple of years after, actually. You would not expect I'd have *any* Clbuttic apps at all.
Ported by fans, as I understand it. Games makers do not, as a rule, bother with stuff like this. snip Yes, indeed: developers who make...
I still wound up with a pair of Clbuttic apps; they are the games Myth and Myth II, which came on a single CD for PC and Mac, you see.
People who've been Apple customers for many years will have Clbuttic apps they purchased *on purpose*.
snip
And developers have told apple "No Way".
A port to Cocoa is an outrageous amount of work for no benefit, for existing apps. They won't do it. They'd leave the platform first. That's why Carbon exists.
Many developers will find the effort to port to Intel quite reasonable; others will find it harder but do it anyway.
It is certainly easier than porting a Mac-only app to Windows!
But there are other options open to developers. One is to shift development efforts to *new* products. Which may be Intel-only. May be sometimes Windows only, for those developers quite sick of Apple's ways.
snip
That app was already portable (there's a Windows version) and has comparatively little UI (it's an odd sort of command line app, in a way).
And even then, they could not release it after the keynote. That tweaking only got them to "seems to mostly work"; there will surely be more suble bugs to track down in such an effort, and that will take time and effort too.
snip
They will feel they are losing their apps anyway, and not for the first time. If they have to repurchases Office, for instance, why should it not be Office XP on Windows?
True, some users are locked in to Mac-only apps with no easy transition to Windows. They will be more likely to stay.