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The Apple situation's slightly more complex than that: they're certainly ruthless with their hardware, but it's a bit of a stretch to claim they have commitment
by rplacd 14y ago
The Apple situation's slightly more complex than that: they're certainly ruthless with their hardware, but it's a bit of a stretch to claim they have commitment issues with their software technologies - ObjC, Foundation and AppKit's been around since the late 1980s from NeXT without serious architectural changes; UIKit'll be around for a while yet; let nothing come between them and their investment in the Apple Compiler Group. (The upshot is that they've sufficiently abstracted hardware away anyway, so hardware changes aren't showstoppers.) If anything, they're more conservative with tossing out the SDKs than most: OpenGL support, for example, is still absurdly piss-poor, even if they're getting better with their GPU driver support. But it does net you compatibility all the way down their HCL - at the bottom end, for example, is the mid-'07 iMac with the ATi 2600 PRO.
They do give not-so-subtle hints to hand over to them the cha-ching, though, when they EOL old versions of XCode - but that's usually the most you're going to encounter. So works Apple in general.
- chc 14y ago> The Apple situation's slightly more complex than that: they're certainly ruthless with their hardware, but it's a bit of a stretch to claim they have commitment issues with their software technologies - ObjC, Foundation and AppKit's been around since the late 1980s from NeXT without serious architectural changes And if you happened to bet on those technologies instead of Carbon, you're probably very happy with that. Well, unless you were writing Cocoa apps with Java, which was pushed as a peer to Objective-C in much the same way that Carbon was presented as a peer to Foundation and AppKit. Those technologies all got killed pretty viciously, even though Apple at various points actually seemed to be promoting them over Objective-C/Cocoa. Apple axes stuff faster than Microsoft is even capable of moving. Looking directly back from their current technology stack, it looks like mostly smooth sailing, but that's because you're not looking at the wreckage to the left and right. (Bonus points: Remember when Apple were all about Garbage-Collected Objective-C until they weren't and suddenly ARC was the new hotness?)