My experience with the PPC transition was definitely not that. A 2004 PowerMac G5 lost basically all software support and required community involvement (the likes of tenfourfox) to even get a competent browser by around 2010. Snow Leopard released in 2009 and didn't support PPC Macs.
That said, I think the Intel transition will likely be slower. Apple has said they plan to keep releasing Intel Mac's and there's certain things (discrete GPU support?) that might motivate them to do so.
That and upgrade cycles on desktops/laptops have also slowed quite a bit in the last 15 years.
6 years from the last hardware sale is also probably a bit forced because PowerPC was never as well supported by compilers, libraries, etc., performance was well behind years before the switch, and Apple has migrated a lot of tasks which used to involve assembler to higher level libraries. This time around I don’t think you’ll have that pressure because it’s not like LLVM is going to stop supporting Intel and most projects are using the same compiler for each platform, so it’s not like you’re going to need to keep an old toolchain like Code Warrior in life support just to ship updates.
Depends on what you want to call support. 3.6 (the last PowerPC and 10.4 compatible version) was indeed supported until the first Extended Support Release with Firefox 10, since 3.6 was effectively the first ESR in all but name. But 3.6 aged awfully fast, and even when 3.6 was current certain features never made it to PowerPC (like the JIT), so I think it's also fair to say the support it got was never the same as x86 Macs did when they emerged.
It definitely wasn’t great - and I know a few people who benefited from your work so thanks!
I think this time would be different because things like compilers wouldn’t be asked to add support for an otherwise unused architecture. Getting anyone to support PPC was hard given the limited market share and got much harder once it was deprecated. There’s definitely some Mac-specific code but a lot of the most expensive code is going to be shared with Windows and Linux support which isn’t going anywhere.
I'd also like to offer my appreciation to you and the TenFourFox. That is the only browser that still works on my G4 and frankly I think few expected that such a project would be made and actively maintained.
I retired my G4-based Mac from everyday use in 2009. I don't recall having major issues. But I suppose it depended on what you were doing. I was doing mostly web, Java, Python at the time.
That's around the time my Powerbook G3 fell out of my daily use as well. Personally I'd say the day they became "outdated" was when Camino stopped being updated: http://caminobrowser.org/releases/2.1.2/
I traded in my iBook g4 around then. It was just too slow and it couldn’t keep up with basic things we all take for granted. The laptop was the fastest around when it came out but everything changed so quickly that decade. Not being able to stream video at any resolution higher than “low” was the final straw for me.
For something that lasted about 9 years, I'd say that was pretty darn good value for money, at least it was in my case. This led me to continue buying Mac's until today, mainly Mac Mini, Macbook Air and Macbook Pro's. None of them have given any issues except the GPU issue on the 2015 MBP, which was sorted out by Apple. I notice that people complain a lot about Apple quality having gone down, but one also has to realize the complexities of their hardware went up quite dramatically, along with their ambitions to change everything now and then (the keyboard flop comes to mind).
That said, I think the Intel transition will likely be slower. Apple has said they plan to keep releasing Intel Mac's and there's certain things (discrete GPU support?) that might motivate them to do so.
That and upgrade cycles on desktops/laptops have also slowed quite a bit in the last 15 years.
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