Tiger and Apple TV will put Apple in an interesting situation, once Snow Leopard comes out.
See, Apple has a house rule on product lifespan. Only the prior, major, release of Mac OS X is to be supported. That means that if a device can’t be upgraded to the last version of Mac OS X, it basically is left out in the cold. And by cold, I mean no security updates, bug fixes, or incorporation of third-party components (Apache, PHP, Ruby, Java, etc). If your Mac can only run Panther, it’s time to put Linux on it… for your own security (or, take it off the internet).
When Snow Leopard ships, Apple is supposed to stop patching up Tiger. But, that’s a problem… because Tiger powers Apple TV. Apple neglected to realize that Leopard would demand at least 512 MB of RAM to operate, and shipped Apple TV with a solitary 256 MB chip. So, Apple TV continues to be powered by Tiger.
Big mistake for Apple. Now, they have to chose: Either abandon Apple TV pre-maturely, or support it beyond their intended resources with security updates and such.
This is costly for Apple… as it means apps like Front Row, and iTunes as well, will need to continue to carry Tiger build targets. That means all the under-the-hood code will continue to have to play by the constraints of Tiger… even if Apple doesn’t update Tiger.
Speaking of which, let’s say Apple patches a bug in Apple TV’s version of Tiger. Shouldn’t they then release that same update (with the same, tested code) for Mac OS X Tiger on Mac? The better question is… will they?
This is really a part of Apple’s growing pains. In the old days, Apple wasn’t successful enough to maintain support for older platforms… there weren’t any successful older platforms other than Mac.
And, this is a prelude to more tough decisions in the Mac and iPod groups. Does Apple plan the next version of OS X (after Snow Leopard) to play well on today’s iPhone hardware? In the old days the answer would be an immdiate no. But, today, App Store is growing faster than iTunes… and it might be in Apple’s interest to keep seeding old iPhones with modern OS versions.
That would certainly put Windows Mobile to shame. There’s no reason a Windows Mobile 2003 phone couldn’t run Windows Mobile 6.1 today… yet Microsoft still won’t push OEMs to make those upgrades… it isn’t in their interest to do so.