Your characterization of my comment is unfair and untrue. I didn't "cherry pick" anything; the above code is from my only significant experience with any Apple-designed API. The grandparent comment in glowing and general terms praised Apple APIs as noticeably better than other APIs, and this ran strongly contrary to my own experience with them. I even mentioned that this was old code, that QTKit has been released in the meantime, and that it is probably better.
I'm not sure why you think that old APIs designed for old architectures are obviously bad or are not relevant to the discussion. How is C substantially different than in 1994, that newer APIs would be better? Why do you think that architectures from 15 years ago required bad APIs? I can think of many excellent APIs that I was using ten years ago or more.
Feel free to say that the new Apple APIs are much better than the old ones, but my experience says that historically Apple has had some very poor ones.
I'm not sure why you think that old APIs designed for old architectures are obviously bad or are not relevant to the discussion. How is C substantially different than in 1994, that newer APIs would be better? Why do you think that architectures from 15 years ago required bad APIs? I can think of many excellent APIs that I was using ten years ago or more.
Feel free to say that the new Apple APIs are much better than the old ones, but my experience says that historically Apple has had some very poor ones.