Apple does have a good record of moving their OS and software from different architectures. 68XXX to PPC to Intel was not a horrible experience. Having gone through three transitions I don't remember a lot of pain - but maybe I am repressing it!
It is fairly common for newer versions of OS X to break software that worked on previous versions. If you try to use Photoshop 6 on a modern version of OS X it isn't going to work. I think this makes the chip transition less painful because no one really expects their old software to work anyway.
Well everyone (including myself) likes to complain about it, but there is a huge difference in how many OS updates it takes to break a legacy application on OS X and Windows. If we really expected the OS X updates to not break things, we'd move to a different OS.
PS6 used the old Carbon Framework. This was developed as a stopgap to allow developers to transition off of MacOS to OSX in the early aughts. It goes to show how little respect Adobe back then had for Apple and Mac users that Apple ended up purchasing and developing Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro IP.
Microsoft Office was another drag on the Carbon library. They also chose to keep their applications in the old format even though they were told repeatedly from Apple that this thing was going away. Eventually they got their shit together and the Office suite for OSX is a best of show.
Not really an excuse when Windows 10 can run most Windows NT4.0 software, can get to run win3.1 and dos apps (which are different OS, not just older versions).
Userspace GNU/Linux is also pretty bad about this, despite the effort put in by Linux.
A few simple apps here and there is not most Windows app. I keep a windows 98 VM around simply because developers played fast and loose with the security of the OS. They would not be able to do that today. Like a user editable ini file in the windows folder.
Yeah, Windows 98 is a completely different OS from modern Windoes, makes sense that compatibility is not strong. It would be like expecting OSX 10 to run classic Mac apps.
I've been through the PPC to Intel migrations so many times for so many school districts that I'm still fairly amazed at how well it usually went as long as the apps weren't trash.
The biggest issues I ran into was always with the low quality edu based applications. So many of the issues we had with those apps were because they were created in Windows and ported half way to OS X, an old PPC version that did something special that the Intel version couldn't do, or the worst one using a special baked in version of Adobe Flash..
I've been out of the edu game for a while now. I want to say it was the Map Testing system. The school district was using a web based system (something lightning? I can't remember) previously, but the state was mandating the use of MAP instead. The state didn't give the schools any options or much time to prepare for it either. The school district had 70+ schools. I spent a summer fixing / getting that stuff working. (still more fun than iPad deployments)
The app wasn't a universal binary at the time. Which would be fine if the PPC version worked with the PPC machines, and Intel worked with the Intel machines. haha.
*Edit
The windows version did usually work without issues. The OS X version eventually worked once they redid the whole application.
Edit: maybe I should explain a little. We were a educational software developer and doing multimedia titles. We had a home grown multimedia engine which served us well (at the time there weren't alternatives) but Flash came along and at the time they would license the engine as a C or C++ library, which we could embed. This would get us a capable engine with superb integration with the content creation tools.
phew, I was hoping MAP wasn't going to come back to haunt me after all these years, haha.
If your application let students finish what they were doing without randomly crashing and losing everything, then it is leaps and bounds better than the MAP system.
The school had to extend the map testing by 2 weeks just because of how often it crashed and students had to retake it. My coworkers at other school districts in other states ran into the same exact issues. Then on Windows, it had to access a SMB share somewhere to dump data to a flat db... that would get corrupted sometimes when a students application froze up... haha. it was job security though.
> 68XXX to PPC to Intel was not a horrible experience.
Unless you rely on a piece of software that does not receive any updates anymore. Then you're basically screwed. I am rather annoyed that Apple is going to break backward compatibility yet again for no good reason. Intel Mac's perform a perfectly adequate job and Intel couldn't really screw Apple because they are a rather good customer.
Intel already has screwed Apple as far as they're concerned - there have been numerous delays in macs attributed to Intel's chip delays. Apple isn't one to take kindly to holding up a significant product line for an external vendor if they have an alternative.
