Re:Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' re...
by hot_gril on Friday October 21, 2022 @04:21PM
(#33292612)
The reality is that many devs don't regularly maintain their software.
Mac OS was not good for games in the end. It was common for a minor OS release to break a good portion of your game library, sometimes permanently. Apple even kneecapped their own OpenGL support trying to push Metal instead. This was all on top of DirectX being Windows-only. Relying on WINE for an official software release is a kludge, and despite the common claim that it comes at no performance cost, somehow things tended to be much slower in it (not from the WINE translation layer itself but some other consequence of semi-incompatibility).
If you look at what most software does, it's pretty static. Like you're telling the OS to draw windows with buttons and run your code in response to inputs. More complex with games, but still. The Mac user interface doesn't change much over time. The software should be a lot safer from OS changes. Microsoft has shown that it's possible, and they did it with third-party hardware! If Apple wanted compatibility with less burden, they could've provided better abstractions to devs.
Mac OS was not good for games in the end. It was common for a minor OS release to break a good portion of your game library, sometimes permanently. Apple even kneecapped their own OpenGL support trying to push Metal instead. This was all on top of DirectX being Windows-only. Relying on WINE for an official software release is a kludge, and despite the common claim that it comes at no performance cost, somehow things tended to be much slower in it (not from the WINE translation layer itself but some other consequence of semi-incompatibility).
If you look at what most software does, it's pretty static. Like you're telling the OS to draw windows with buttons and run your code in response to inputs. More complex with games, but still. The Mac user interface doesn't change much over time. The software should be a lot safer from OS changes. Microsoft has shown that it's possible, and they did it with third-party hardware! If Apple wanted compatibility with less burden, they could've provided better abstractions to devs.