Is Apple - after IBM and Microsoft - the next ugly Gorilla?

[Lazybaer]

Hi

Just discovered, that all the unsupported applications by Lion and the dozens of scripts working not anymore go beyond 100 ...

Where are the good old times when a 25 year old material disposition program, written in RPG I, ran over 25 (!) years. On a big iron of IBM.

Tempi passati.

Lazy

[benwiggy]

Quote: Originally Posted by Lazybaer Just discovered, that all the unsupported applications by Lion and the dozens of scripts working not anymore go beyond 100 ...

Can you be more specific? Anything that was compiled in PPC code will no longer run on Lion -- but it's been six or seven years since Apple made the announcement to change to Intel. Some software companies still hadn't recompiled their code, and are only now making an effort as Apple has forced them into it. (Rightly so, IMHO.)

Shell scripts and AppleScripts (uncompiled) should all still work. Nearly everything that ran on Snow Leopard and most things that run on Leopard (as Intel) should still run on Lion.

Stability is nice, but progress inevitably means leaving things behind.
Should a brand new i7 quad-core Mac, which runs an OS released in 2011, still make provision for running code written in 1989 for System 6 on a Motorolla 68000?

Obviously, old machines can still run old code.

[Red_Menace]

Apple has never been afraid to drop old or unwieldy technologies. The pace seems to be a bit quicker these days, since they are still working out the underlying frameworks that support all the latest features and gizmos.

Of course, the main reason those programs ran for so long is that the "big iron" didn't change that much, since it was so expensive - these days the hardware is almost obsolete by the time you get it out of the box.

[NovaScotian]

One of the reasons (among several) that Microsoft hasn't innovated in the last few years has been its habit to support legacy forever.

[benwiggy]

It's a fine line, I suppose, between keeping your platform stable and introducing new technologies (or rather, ditching old ones).

Apple is often accused of "built-in obsolescence". That might be true if the hardware didn't last so long. People are still buying and selling PPC hardware on eBay, and using it. In computing terms, that's old hardware. So I don't think that's a fair charge.

My 2006 Core2Duo iMac is just about ready to give up the ghost**, but I'm pretty confident that everything I have running on it now will run on its replacement.
That's because I'm already running Lion and don't have any "legacy" software, having upgraded everything to Intel [64-bit] apps.

Who knows -- perhaps in another six years, Apple will move to ARM.....

** Dear God, where are the new iMacs!!!!!

[mclbruce]

In his closing address at SXSWI, Bruce Sterling used the term "stacks" to describe Apple, Google, and Microsoft. It's slightly divergent from the main point of this thread, but you may find it interesting to listen to.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/s...33?i=112104443