Copyright 2004 by M. Uli Kusterer Fri, 29 Nov -1901 11:06:32 GMT Comments on article blog-wwdc08-predictions at Zathras.de http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-wwdc08-predictions.htm witness_dot_of_dot_teachtext_at_gmx_dot_net (M. Uli Kusterer) witness_dot_of_dot_teachtext_at_gmx_dot_net (M. Uli Kusterer) en-us http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-wwdc08-predictions.htm#comment4 http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-wwdc08-predictions.htm#comment4 Uli Kusterer writes:
@Ahruman: Don't get me started on fonts ... I've been trying for years to find another font, but of the ones available on Macs these days, and those available to most web browsers on any OS, I haven't found a single one that looked decent, so I just kept Futura. I don't know what happened, they must have changed all fonts under the hood while I wasnt watching.
http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-wwdc08-predictions.htm#comment3 http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-wwdc08-predictions.htm#comment3 Ahruman writes:

http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-wwdc08-predictions.htm#comment2 http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-wwdc08-predictions.htm#comment2 Uli Kusterer writes:
Well, with the announcement it'd be going away in '06 and then increasing pressure on people to move off of it, Apple can probably get rid of it in a couple years. I don't think it will be now, unless there's some good break-off point, like a new device with a different CPU or so, but then it won't be across the board.

While Carbon is a hard beast to describe in a user-comprehensible way, especially since there are calls that may be going away that are also used in Cocoa apps, I don't think it's as much of an issue as you believe: There have traditionally been apps that broke on a major system update, and that wasn't predictable in any way either.

But a no-Carbon update would need to be very compelling if it were to happen sooner rather than later to prevent the adoption issues Vista had.

Though one thing to keep in mind is that, even if Apple officially removed Carbon, that wouldn't mean they couldn't keep using it for their own stuff. The resources they spend supporting third parties with Carbon DTS incidents, Carbon bug fixes etc. could be used elsewhere if the only people still using Carbon were a couple hundred guys inside Apple working on a comparatively limited range of products.
http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-wwdc08-predictions.htm#comment1 http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-wwdc08-predictions.htm#comment1 Can Apple reasonably remove Carbon any time soon? I don't think so.

People don't buy OS upgrades and new hardware without backwards compatibility. (This is why they sing the binary compatibility song.) We had Classic for a very long time, and without Rosetta there would have been no Intel transition.

By dropping Carbon, they have a very confusing compatibility story. Some of your old univeral apps will work, others won't. Which ones? Hard to say from the consumer's POV. Office? No. Adobe Suite? No. Filemaker? No. What about my games? Probably not.