Windows.. it's like coming home! 3395

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Consider the complaints leveled against OS X by many of the Mac community when it first came out; these people wanted the OS 9 UI replicated on a modern kernel. This is not 'valuing progress'.

I think the set of people or 'perceived' OS 9 as being 'ahead' of anything, and were not just change-averse, is small. OS 9 was had been stagnating for a long, long time by then.

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I do not think the 'niche' is this broad.

Apple continues to target certain creative professionals, and *part* of the consumer market.

But the larger part of the consumer market is more interested in games than making home movies, and Apple isn't really trying too hard here.

"Tech-heads who want a good desktop Unix" are, I think, very largely the open-source crowd. Apple has been quite ambivalent about this, but in any event it's a very small segment.

Apple is treating the education market as something of an afterthought these days. Most of their product is far too expensive for that segment, so they produce these odd cut down "education Macs" of various sorts. They haven't quite given up, but it's clearly not equal to the consumer and creative profession segments they target.

I do not believe for a minute apple things their 'niche' comprises more than half of the market!

But you are right about the margins, with the obvious exception of education. I suspect that's *why* Apple threads education in the way it does.

Everyone specializes. It seems to be Apple is specializing rather narrowly. And I *did* say this may eb the right choice for Apple, so please don't get bent out of shape.

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This stuff *is* hard, but I don't buy the line that says RISC machines are much better at emulation. Neither did Transitive, evidently. :D

I agree; they weren't going to spend a lot of money building an emulator for a contingency. But had there not been a Transitive, Apple could have built an emulator. It might not have been as good, but it does not really need to be. This thing was only ever a stopgap, remember.

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Maybe. The Steve said, when he annouced this, that he had not told the developers until a week before.

As I understand it, the G4 and G5 were like this. They didn't look so good when unless you were breaking out the specialist software that used Altivec; then they could beat the world. Well, x86 anyway.

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Yes, Metrowerks was clearly not happy on the Mac *before* the switch happened; and also MS was cutting back on Mac developement before that.

So Metrowerks "go to hell" migration plan, and MS's "well port something, someday" approach are not that suprising, considering.

But it's clearly not all roses and song, and it might have been worse. Indeed it could still get worse, though it is something that several major developers have promised Universal versions of important apps.

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