We don't HAVE to move on at all
Hi Harry,
No we don't HAVE to move on! Computer suppliers. and operating system suppliers have an obligation to maintain backwards compatibility. Apple did it brilliantly when it introduced OS X on the power-pc series. I can still run OS 7 apps on my power PC lap top (which I have kept, complete with its start up discs...).
My wife, for example, is happily using her (intel) macbook with OS 10.4.11. Its fast, stable and holds few surprises for her. The simplest upgrade short of a new machine (around $1300 she doesn't want to spend), would take about 6 hrs (back up HDD, make a clone, test it, go though about two stages of update, test it, plus the machine will need more memory.)
For many users (even corporate ones) the effort associated with an upgrade could approach the effort of changing platforms. This "reverse lockin" was ignored by many cpu manufacturers in the 70's and 80's, with a predicted effect.
I would take a lot of convincing that Apple could NOT have come up with a virtual machine solution that would have allowed users to run multiple apple OS's, or, that it was not technically competent enough to come up with a new version of Rosetta that would run under Maverick.
As I said, we don't HAVE to move on!
Karl