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I had forgotten these details about the evolution of Classic's PPC support, thanks! Now that you've nudged my brain cells I do remember them trying to modernize that and other things. Stuff like the nanokernel... iirc we never got to take full advantage of its features before end of the road for Classic.

Classic MacOS had so much technical debt. Cramming a GUI as sophisticated as 1984 Macintosh into 64K ROM, 128K RAM, and a 400K boot floppy created lots of design compromises that were unfortunate in the long term. (So much so that sometimes "long term" meant maybe two or three years in the future.)

NeXT even had their own 68K to PowerPC transition (hardware and software) mostly ready to go, but it didn't make it out the door before NeXT's dismal revenues forced them to abandon making hardware.

I do wonder how different things would be today if Apple had good and effective leadership in the early 1990s. If they'd directed the resources wasted on things like Taligent and OpenDoc towards less glamorous incremental improvement of Mac OS, would they have been successful enough to not even need to go looking for a different OS by 1996?

<blockquote data-quote="mr_roboto" data-source="post: 164173" data-attributes="member: 279">I had forgotten these details about the evolution of Classic's PPC support, thanks!&nbsp; Now that you've nudged my brain cells I do remember them trying to modernize that and other things.&nbsp; Stuff like the nanokernel... iirc we never got to take full advantage of its features before end of the road for Classic.Classic MacOS had so much technical debt.&nbsp; Cramming a GUI as sophisticated as 1984 Macintosh into 64K ROM, 128K RAM, and a 400K boot floppy created lots of design compromises that were unfortunate in the long term. (So much so that sometimes &quot;long term&quot; meant maybe two or three years in the future.)NeXT even had their own 68K to PowerPC transition (hardware and software) mostly ready to go, but it didn't make it out the door before NeXT's dismal revenues forced them to abandon making hardware.I do wonder how different things would be today if Apple had good and effective leadership in the early 1990s.&nbsp; If they'd directed the resources wasted on things like Taligent and OpenDoc towards less glamorous incremental improvement of Mac OS,&nbsp; would they have been successful enough to not even need to go looking for a different OS by 1996?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="mr_roboto, post: 164173, member: 279"] I had forgotten these details about the evolution of Classic's PPC support, thanks! Now that you've nudged my brain cells I do remember them trying to modernize that and other things. Stuff like the nanokernel... iirc we never got to take full advantage of its features before end of the road for Classic. Classic MacOS had so much technical debt. Cramming a GUI as sophisticated as 1984 Macintosh into 64K ROM, 128K RAM, and a 400K boot floppy created lots of design compromises that were unfortunate in the long term. (So much so that sometimes "long term" meant maybe two or three years in the future.) NeXT even had their own 68K to PowerPC transition (hardware and software) mostly ready to go, but it didn't make it out the door before NeXT's dismal revenues forced them to abandon making hardware. I do wonder how different things would be today if Apple had good and effective leadership in the early 1990s. If they'd directed the resources wasted on things like Taligent and OpenDoc towards less glamorous incremental improvement of Mac OS, would they have been successful enough to not even need to go looking for a different OS by 1996? [/QUOTE]

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