Windows.. it's like coming home! 3394

I'm not sure what you mean. Apple has taken a more aggressive approach to trading off compatibility for progress, vs. the Clbuttic Mac OS era, it's true. This probably has resulted in some shifting of the user base. People who weren't happy with the new approach may have left, and people who found it more attractive may have hopped on board.

But many people used the Mac -- even in the OS 9 days -- because they perceived it as being ahead, and I'd think those folks would be fairly likely to accept Apple's current approach, understanding that it helps Apple stay ahead.

The consumer market + creative professionals + tech-heads who want a good desktop *nix + the education market... doesn't seem like a niche. It's at least four niches, which together comprise a very significant fraction of the market; maybe more than half. And every one of those "niches" except possibly education almost certainly has higher margins than corporate sales.

Look, everyone specializes. Why Apple doesn't focus more on backwards compatibility to appeal more to the enterprise? Well, why doesn't Dell hire some decent industrial designers, write its own integrated suite of consumer media applications and open lots of retail stores to appeal more to consumers?

That's just not Dell's thing. And putting a minitower in every cubicle isn't Apple's thing.

Efficiently emulating PPC on x86 was long regarded as being an extremely difficult task. It's apparently much easier to emulate CISC architectures on RISC architectures than to do the reverse. PPC on x86 had been tried before, with extremely poor results. When Transitive first announced its technology, there was widespread skepticism.

It would have been a bit silly of Apple to just buttume this problem could be made to go away at the right time. There's no indication they were ever working on this in-house, which suggests either they thought it would be so easy they could do it in a hurry if they needed it (which seems unlikely, given what everyone else thought), or they didn't think they could do it at all, so they didn't bother, and they just accepted that if they ever did have to activate their last-ditch contingency plans, it would be ugly. (Thus the reason for the plans being considered last-ditch.)

You're saying it was not so risky for Apple, but implying it was extremely risky for the Mac platform. It wasn't.

A scenario in which Apple announced and began implementing an architecture transition and then major developers decided not to support it and the platform dropped dead... was basically impossible. I rather suspect the major developers were consulted before Apple decided to go down this road, and if they hadn't been on board, Apple would still be on PPC.

(One can imagine an interesting alternate history where Apple jumped to, for instance, a version of Cell, but with somewhat better end of regular PPC code than the PS3 model, and ended up with systems which were slower than x86 machines for common desktop tasks, but were monstrous beasts for media with the right software. It wouldn't have been such a bad fit for the consumer and creative pro markets.)

IMO, the writing was on the wall there for a long time, once Apple expressed an interest in making the premier tools for Mac development (and giving them away free, no less).

In other news, the sun is expected to rise tomorrow....

-- "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." -- George W. Bush in Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005