From what I can tell (the video, ironically, was taken down) he said this in 1994, which was right at an inflection point. 10 years from there in either direction was a huge change. He'd just shipped the fastest 68k NeXT workstation they'd ever build. 10 years earlier was the original Macintosh, and 10 years later was the PowerMac G5. Obviously there's not going to be much compatibility across those systems.
The curve has flattened out, and the number of architectures has shrunk. I'm typing this on a 10-year-old computer, and it's running modern software just fine.
We're not building systems like we used to. We're taking maintainability into account. Performance is good enough that applications rarely publish hardware requirements. Continuing to assume that everyone is going to throw out their computer (and its entire architecture) in 5 years, so we might as well make developers rewrite everything, is just going to lead to a lot of frustrated developers. A little more care inside Apple could save a ton of time outside of it.
Apple is great at long-term thinking in some respects, and terrible in others.
The curve has flattened out, and the number of architectures has shrunk. I'm typing this on a 10-year-old computer, and it's running modern software just fine.
We're not building systems like we used to. We're taking maintainability into account. Performance is good enough that applications rarely publish hardware requirements. Continuing to assume that everyone is going to throw out their computer (and its entire architecture) in 5 years, so we might as well make developers rewrite everything, is just going to lead to a lot of frustrated developers. A little more care inside Apple could save a ton of time outside of it.
Apple is great at long-term thinking in some respects, and terrible in others.