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I think Apple would absolutely drop support for Rosetta-- they do this stuff all the time.  Considering that most people didn't really start using OS X until 10.2, even Classic probably should've been around a few more years.  They dropped floppies at the height of their reign, at a time when flash drives and CD recorders were expensive commodities.  I still remember when the original iMac came out --the next day, you started seeing translucent usb floppy drives everywhere. 

Then there was the Apple //, Macintosh, and Apple IIGS --all incompatible with one another, even though they were (at one point) all being produced at the same time.

The 68k compatibility mode was probably the best example of Apple legacy support --I'm sure they only kept it around because parts of the old OS were never ported to PPC.  Even then, the performance was quite terrible-- At worst, Rosetta is about 1/3 as fast as native, but the 68k emulator was like 20 times slower.

I can't really blame Apple -- their focus is on the consumer market, whose user base is inherently more adaptable.  Microsoft is focused more on enterprise, where maintaining compatibility with custom software (much of which is seldom updated) is absolutely critical.  In any case, I would be surprised if Rosetta makes it to Snow Leopard.

Last edited by Mr. T (2009-07-21 4:37 pm)

The thing is right now there's no reason to drop it. It still works fine in Snow Leopard, there's no reason to leave it out. The "engine" is already done, and it only takes 2MB on your HD. While Apple could just drop it, there's no reason to right now. Especially since not everyone has updated their apps to Intel yet.

Classic was dropped because in order to make it work on an Intel, they'd have to actually port OS 9 to Intel. Which is not an option. Because Classic actually ran OS 9 inside its own shell in OS X. And at this point it's been 9 years since the switch. Pretty much everyone who has bought a Mac in the past few years doesn't really have a huge need for Classic apps anymore. Rosetta is just emulating an architecture, not a whole new OS. And it's already done, works pretty much flawlessly and seamlessly, there's really no reason not to include it.

Also, yes, Dock Exposé certainly is the bees knees as the kids these days would say, if I'm up on my teen slang terminology. It's completely superior to the Exposé we were introduced to with 10.3. I use it all the time, even more than I used single app mode in 10.5 and before. Click and hold is nice. If there was one thing I would want, it's the ability to include hidden app windows in "All Windows" mode just because they finally added minimized windows. I mean, it IS "all windows", not "all windows except hidden app windows" mode. But whatever.

Jasoco wrote:

Classic was dropped because in order to make it work on an Intel, they'd have to actually port OS 9 to Intel. Which is not an option. Because Classic actually ran OS 9 inside its own shell in OS X. And at this point it's been 9 years since the switch. Pretty much everyone who has bought a Mac in the past few years doesn't really have a huge need for Classic apps anymore. Rosetta is just emulating an architecture, not a whole new OS. And it's already done, works pretty much flawlessly and seamlessly, there's really no reason not to include it.

It doesn't quite work like that.  Classic was a virtual machine capable of booting OS 9.  As far as OS X was concerned, Classic was an ordinary OS X PPC Application.  Had Apple stopped there, they would've recreated SheepShaver.  In other words, running OS 9 apps would've required launching Classic, booting to an OS 9 desktop, and running the app as you would in OS 9.

But Apple didn't want OS 9 to run as a separate environment within OS X.  They wanted OS 9 Apps to coexist with OS X apps, share clipboard data, use hardware acceleration, printers, etc...  To create the illusion of integration, Apple included special software that ran inside the OS 9 environment, which basically allowed the OS 9 environment and the Classic application to talk to each other.  So, for example, every time OS 9 drew a window, it would send its new coordinates to Classic --Classic would then clip out everything except for the new Window, and draw it to the screen as an OS X window.  Every time a user copied data to the OS 9 clipboard, OS 9 would send the new information to Classic, and Classic would update the OS X clipboard with the new data (and vice-versa).  A similar process allowed OS 9 to share the same file system, draw hardware-accelerated graphics, print, network, and so forth.

It was really a beautiful piece of work, when you think about it.  But, at the most fundamental level, Classic was just an ordinary OS X PPC Application.  Yet, like many other PPC Apps, Classic was not entirely compatible with Rosetta.  Instead of taking the time to address the compatibility issues (which I believe would've been miniscule) Apple decided that most people didn't run OS 9 apps, and saw the incompatibility as an opportunity to abandon Classic.  Some folks cried, some used SheepShaver, some were curiously "glad," but most folks didn't seem to mind.

Rosetta, on the other hand, is a bit more touchy.  The main problem there, is that it's not Apple's.  Rosetta's future depends, in large part, on Apple's deal with Transitive (since acquired by IBM).  Did they license the code for something like 5 years?  Did they buy the rights to use the code indefinitely?  Does IBM get 2% of every copy of OS X sold?  We may never know.   Personally, I hope it stays.

I hope so, too.  I still have some apps that I use.  My top 3 are Fugu (because I keep forgetting how to use SCP with SSH), Maelstrom (because it's the best game ever made) and AppleWorks (for its drawing module and compatibility issues).

Incidentally, MacTheRipper 3.0 is Intel-native.

Last edited by Mr. T (2009-07-23 12:11 am)

Mr. T wrote:

Then there was the Apple //, Macintosh, and Apple IIGS --all incompatible with one another, even though they were (at one point) all being produced at the same time.

It still bugs me that Apple didn't ease the transition from the Apple//e to the Mac. They should have come up with a reasonably cheap/fast way to get the data off those 5-inch floppies and onto 3-inch floppies or hard drives. The most obvious was was to spend $200 on a Super Serial card, and even that would have been clumsy.  The //GS came with Localtalk, but that was awfully late in the game.

They should have kept Classic so the olde games would still work. Anyway, I'm heartened that Apple has backed off killing Firewire on their low-end laptop.

mackerm wrote:

It still bugs me that Apple didn't ease the transition from the Apple//e to the Mac.

you do realize they were literally fighting at the time.

mackerm wrote:

Anyway, I'm heartened that Apple has backed off killing Firewire on their low-end laptop.

I don't think Apple ever intended to kill firewire. I think they didn't have the development done on their modified chipset, and went with a more "stock" motherboard configuration until they could get the board out with firewire.

They did something similar back at the beginning of the Intel transition.

Jasoco wrote:

I just hope they don't go back on their SD card thing. It would look like another breaking to pressure thing. And how many times can they do that? It would be like if they decided in 1999 to put a floppy back in the iMac because of all the complainers back then.

Two words: Puck Mouse.

The lesson is that Steve Jobs doesn't always crap caviar.

Pariah wrote:

Mr. T wrote:

The 68k compatibility mode was probably the best example of Apple legacy support --I'm sure they only kept it around because parts of the old OS were never ported to PPC.  Even then, the performance was quite terrible-- At worst, Rosetta is about 1/3 as fast as native, but the 68k emulator was like 20 times slower.

The difference in speed between a 68k app and a native PPC app was quite small in practice.
At least that's what I remember from my use a Macs during that period and my use was rather extensive.
68k emulation was one hell of a piece of work. Arguably the best arch emulation ever.

There were two different emulators: the first-generation interpreter, and the second generation dynamic recompiler (available in later PPC Macs).  The interpreter was about 1/3 as fast as Speed Doubler's 68k emulation (based on the few reviews I could dig up), which itself, was a fraction of native speed.  The dynamic recompiler was substantially better, but still not as fast as Speed Doubler. 

In the real world, it depends on the Application: Apps that are memory or I/O bound will run acceptably well even under Apple's first-generation emulator, simply because the CPU isn't being stressed that much, and and the limiting components became faster in PPC Macs.  The PPC chips themselves were quite a bit more powerful than the 040, further aiding the perceived emulation speed.

Mr. T wrote:

Pariah wrote:

Mr. T wrote:

The 68k compatibility mode was probably the best example of Apple legacy support --I'm sure they only kept it around because parts of the old OS were never ported to PPC.  Even then, the performance was quite terrible-- At worst, Rosetta is about 1/3 as fast as native, but the 68k emulator was like 20 times slower.

The difference in speed between a 68k app and a native PPC app was quite small in practice.
At least that's what I remember from my use a Macs during that period and my use was rather extensive.
68k emulation was one hell of a piece of work. Arguably the best arch emulation ever.

There were two different emulators: the first-generation interpreter, and the second generation dynamic recompiler (available in later PPC Macs).  The interpreter was about 1/3 as fast as Speed Doubler's 68k emulation (based on the few reviews I could dig up), which itself, was a fraction of native speed.  The dynamic recompiler was substantially better, but still not as fast as Speed Doubler. 

In the real world, it depends on the Application: Apps that are memory or I/O bound will run acceptably well even under Apple's first-generation emulator, simply because the CPU isn't being stressed that much, and and the limiting components became faster in PPC Macs.  The PPC chips themselves were quite a bit more powerful than the 040, further aiding the perceived emulation speed.

There is also that many 68k apps were originally developed for Macs in the sub 50mhz range so even in emulation they would run just dandy one something like a 133/604 (for one example).
A little emulation story. in 99 or 2000 I was given a copy of Photoshop 1.0. Under OS9 I was able to open that 15 year old piece of Mac software. Not bad.

Pariah wrote:

There is also that many 68k apps were originally developed for Macs in the sub 50mhz range so even in emulation they would run just dandy one something like a 133/604 (for one example).
A little emulation story. in 99 or 2000 I was given a copy of Photoshop 1.0. Under OS9 I was able to open that 15 year old piece of Mac software. Not bad.

I used to use Photoshop 2.5 all the time on PPC.  The old emulator was pretty damn compatible.