> The result is that most Mac apps are kept up to date by the developer.
That's maybe true for indie developers. It's not generally true for things like Photoshop, Microsoft Office, MATLAB, Mathematica, Skype, and dozens of other major titles that would likely be complete dealbreakers for a pretty significant portion of their userbase.
Apple kept Carbon (the OS9 to OS X transitional bindings) around for so long because of Photoshop and Office.
From personal experience, I can tell you that this does not happen with big software. Apple released the first Intel Macs in early 2006. The next year Intuit released Quicken 2007 which was PPC only.
The first version of Quicken to be x86 for Mac was Quicken Essentials 2010. First of all that's four years after the transition. Second, Quicken Essentials was crippled. Here's a quote from Wikipedia:
> Some of the features of Quicken are not present in Quicken Essentials for Mac, such as the ability to track investment buys and sells or to pay bills online from the application.
So unless you wanted something ultra-basic you were screwed. Intuit's answer was that they'd give you a free copy of Quick '08 for Windows. All you needed to do was buy Parallels (etc.) and Windows.
This was a big problem because OS X finally dropped PPC emulation support, called Rosetta, in 2011 with the release of Lion. So after 5 years Intuit, a VERY big company, was unwilling to update their software or provide a real equivalent for their Mac users.
If you look at the announcements for each version of Adobe Creative Suite for Mac you'll find references to starting to use features of the OS that Apple introduced years ago.
That's maybe true for indie developers. It's not generally true for things like Photoshop, Microsoft Office, MATLAB, Mathematica, Skype, and dozens of other major titles that would likely be complete dealbreakers for a pretty significant portion of their userbase.