The Mac successfully transitioned from 68K to PPC and beyond, so why not the Amiga?

You’re probably still right, but I think the argument is a little more complex.

Yes, the Mac somehow surviving the 90s computer apocalypse is an interesting counterpoint but I think the Mac is an exceptional case. Apple started from a much stronger financial, installed base and brand position than Commodore, Atari et al and even then they only barely managed to survive. A key reason is that most key Mac software applications like desktop publishing were far more amenable to emulation on a PPC than Amiga's gaming, graphics, animation and real-time video software. In a similar conversation a few months ago another HN poster observed:

> The Macintosh line managed to transition to PowerPC, but they did so via software emulation. That would've been highly problematic for the kind of software (games and early multimedia - not DTP, which was the Macintosh domain) where the Amiga and Atari ST were at their strongest. Other m68k machines in common use included, e.g. Sun and NeXT workstations which would've been running highly portable code without 'tight' performance requirements. (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43728024)

To which I responded: This is an excellent point and one I hadn't fully appreciated until reading your comment. Most of the popular 68K software on Macs (such as DTP) was more amenable, or at least tolerant, of running under emulation. Even the popular games on Mac like Myst weren't as real-time critical as popular Amiga and Atari ST games which tended more toward arcade style and sometimes even accurate arcade ports. While I'm sure there were arcade style games for color 68K Macs, they weren't the majority. Also, because the Mac didn't have so many tightly integrated custom co-processors, my sense is that Mac 68K software wasn't as tightly hardware coupled and counting on specific timing interactions. A fair amount of Amiga software would read and write directly to hardware registers instead of using OS calls and even if it only used OS routines, it could still be highly dependent on precise behavior. Once again, we see that aspects which had made the Amiga and Atari ST great in the 80s, made it harder to navigate the transitions necessary to survive the 90s.

It would be interesting to have modern emulator authors compare notes about the software libraries between these platforms. While I'm sure Mac emulator authors still found a lot of 'misbehaving' Mac apps to deal with, my sense is the Amiga software library was bonkers to support in emulation. The WinUAE Amiga emulator has long had a precisely cycle-accurate mode which is less performant but simply necessary in many cases. And as mature as WinUAE is, the team is still discovering edge cases where 40 year-old games and graphics apps have never been emulated correctly.

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amiga386 3 days ago | parent [-]

Agreed! In the 68k Mac's lifetime, you could emulate a Mac on an Amiga in realtime (in software alone with ShapeShifter, or add hardware support with A-Max II) and run most of its software, as that software was OS-bound and never touched hardware directly, whereas most AmigaOS software touched Amiga hardware, so never the other way around.

There's also different audiences. If you had an Amiga because it had cool, arcade quality games for the time... you'd be looking for more cool games in future. So you'd *probably look to the SNES and Megadrive, and then the Playstation. Hence you'd switch to them rather than stick with the Amiga.

Whereas, if you were a business, you're looking for the software you bought to keep working. If you were in publishing, you had Quark Express on Macs. If you were in music production, you had Cubase on Atari STs, Sibeleus on Acorns (though in the case of both of those, there was pressure on the software vendors to make an Intel/Windows version too). If you were is business, you had Word and Excel on IBM PCs and compatibles. Hence why you'd stick with that line of computers.

The Amiga never really had much of a "professional" following, even though its multimedia software opened up a lot of amateur creativity. There were only really things like the Video Toaster in the USA, and even that obscured that it was actually an Amiga.

That said... even the Mac was not certain to survive. In the 1990s, Apple suffered from a lot of clone Macs taking away their market share; ultimately what saved them was Microsoft being forced to keep them on life support (keep producing Office for Mac), and ultimately Steve Jobs return and bringing NeXT with him, which turned into Mac OS X and the iMac and renewed relevance.

	▲	mrandish 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I ran an A-Max mac emulator on my 030 accelerated Amiga 2000. It worked surprisingly well! > ultimately what saved them was Microsoft Indeed. At the time of MSFTs surprise investment of $150M in Apple (supposedly arranged in a single phone call from Steve to Bill), more than one pundit opined that the Justice Department's anti-trust investigation into Microsoft was a major factor. I don't recall the exact timing of the suit being filed vs the investment but MSFT certainly knew well in advance that a suit was likely as the Justice Department investigated for years before filing. A key part of MSFT's anti-trust defense was that there were viable competitors, of which Apple was the best example. At the time of the investment Apple was, arguably, just months away from running out of cash. Jobs needed the money to buy time so he could rework the marketing and products. I've always thought that investment was a smartly pragmatic move by Gates. It was a relatively cheap way to ensure he still had one competitor on life support that wasn't quite dead yet - and, although I'm sure Gates didn't expect it, MSFT actually ended up making money on the investment (although Gates would have happily given up that profit to not have the iPod->iPhone->iPad to compete with later :-) ).