> Porting from PPC to x86 was arguably more difficult as a lot more of the framework code had endianness assumptions baked in. Did it? The code they inherited

> Porting from PPC to x86 was arguably more difficult as a lot more of the framework code had endianness assumptions baked in. Did it? The code they inherited from NeXT didn't assume endianness, and until Rhapsody Developer Release 2 they shipped x86 builds. Some applications like iTunes ran on Windows, with a partial port of the Cocoa libraries underlying them (this, too, was a descendent of old NeXT support for Windows). It's entirely plausible that Apple didn't have to do much; as they said at the time, they never stopped supporting x86 after Rhapsody Developer Release 2, and they had the OS running on x86 the entire time. I'd assume from the point of view of most developers working on OS X they simply had requirements to avoid endian assumptions, etc., and occasionally the team maintaining x86 support would send a nondescript patch to "fix the endianness assumption".