Quote:
Originally Posted by nobody
Just because Apple was using PPC they ported the OS to PPC instead of the logical choice that was x86. Then Apple ported everything to x86 lol
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PPC was a logical step at the time due to endianess, porting to x86 would have meant no integrated 68k emulation, and no smooth transition - not a logical step. When NeXT took over at Apple, they brought NeXTSTEP, a BSD UNIX and a GUI/API/development toolkit OPENSTEP, that already had proven portable, and endian-agnostic, existing on both 68k and x86 (and SPARC, DEC Alpha and more), so porting to PowerPC while maintaining x86 compatibility was not a huge issue. Certain components from classic MacOS was also ported to OPENSTEP, as well as "look and feel". During this process of merging OPENSTEP ("yellowbox") and MacOS components ("bluebox"), while updating the underlying UNIX (mach3+BSD kernel known as Darwin, user-land from FreeBSD), the OS was known as Rhapsody and was first available for x86 and PowerPC, and once it was "ready" (aka "MacOS X Server 1.0 pre-release", aka "Rhapsody Premium") only on PowerPC, as Apple wanted to lock it to their own hardware after all, and emulation/dual-booting to old MacOS was only possible on PowerPC. This was in 1999. There is no doubt that Apple made sure x86 compatibility was kept all through the "MacOS X on PowerPC" years (2000-2006), which was mostly a period for porting software from old MacOS to OSX. Once the vast majority of important legacy software had been ported to OSX, making a "flip" to x86 was easy - for the most part it would just be matter of switching target in the compiler.
So, IMO, it is wrong to say that Apple "ported the OS from PPC to x86", the vast part of that job was done already at NeXT, and what happened at Apple was porting to PowerPC while maintaining portability with x86 (and other possibly relevant archs), as well as porting certain concepts from old MacOS to the new OS ("Carbon"). The goal has been all the time to make transitions as smooth as possible, for developers and users alike, and I would say it has been a huge success in that regard - Apple are now in a position that they can switch to any architecture whenever they wish, with minimal impact on the software portfolio.