Re: How many times must Apple make such DRASTIC architecture changes?

[Tim Cutts <timc@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

In article <1118483094.b509c54d0d9fdb689211b19c303046d4@teranews>,
Paul Schlyter  <pausch.NO@SPAM.saaf.se> wrote:
>Otoh you'll have to get updated device drivers whenever there's a major
>change in architecture.  This is manageable in the UNIX world, where 
>relatively few hardware devices are connected.  But the PC world is 
>different - nowadays there are so many different hardware devices you can 
>buy cheaply and attach (most often to the USB port).  And e.g. every brand 
>of digital camera seem to require its own device driver.  A major 
>architecture change may then mean not being able to use perhaps half of 
>these devices after the change, because the manufacturer didn't supply an 
>updated driver.

That's a fair point, but the drivers shouldn't need much more than a
re-build either; the peripheral hardware won't change much (and it's the
same these days on most computers, PCs, Macs, Workstations or anything
else - it's a commodity computing world we live in)

In fact, driver development should get easier for peripheral
manufacturer now; they write one bit that talks to the hardware, which
should now be the same code on both an x86 Mac and a Wintel, and
another bit which talks to the host OS, which will need writing
separately for Windows and OS X, just as it is now.

But that OS-dependent part will build fine from the same source code on
both PPC and x86, so we shouldn't have a problem.

In theory.  Lazy programmers may make it become a problem.

Tim