Apple had pretty decent backwards compatibility up to OS 9
OS X obviously threw a monkey wrench in that
Old API's still persist but, with Carbon, many portions have been
deprecated

That was my whole point. Toolbox was relatively stable, and as long as a developer did not depend on a feature in a later OS, software would run across a wide range of Macs. Apple encouraged developers to test for and branch to optional features via Gestalt to insure wide compatibility.

And, since OS X itself is evolving fairly rapidly anything that is
written to support a new API will have issues on older versions.
Not to say a developer could not make it work but they seem not to

Writing to a later OS feature and simply losing two versions of support because of an Xcode update are two different things. Developers "seem not to" because of the effort required. The Mac upgrade cycle, both OS and hardware, has been compressed during OS X. I don't care for that "direction" in the Mac world. Maybe OS X will settle down post-Intel and it will get better, but the recent Xcode update, with zero documentation on how to restore support for 10.2.x and 10.3.x users, leaving the task to bloggers, doesn't encourage me.

But, getting a Vista only app I'm sure will happen fairly quickly if
it relies on something specific in Aero
That's happened on both OS's

Perhaps Vista will prove just as disruptive to the line of compatibility. But for a while now, Win32 has been remarkably stable and it has been trivial to support users with longer upgrade cycles.

Yup
One of the kids uses it pretty much every day for surfing and playing
games and listening to music

We'll have to agree to disagree. I consider X a slug on anything below a G5. Like I said, I went through three Mac machine upgrades in the time frame I was served by one PC, not because I wanted to, but because I felt I had to to get any productivity.

Daniel L. Taylor
Taylor Design
Computer Consulting & Software Development
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.taylor-design.com



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