Why the Apple II ProDOS 2.4 Release Is the OS News of the Year | Hacker News Reader

Why the Apple II ProDOS 2.4 Release Is the OS News of the Year

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I have so much admiration for the people who keep old platforms alive. I tinker with a Commodore 64 (a real one) now and then, and I'm just blown away by the community that still exists around it. People still write new software, build new hardware (I have a MSSIAH synth/MIDI interface cartridge and it's a blast to play with), make new demos and intros, discover new graphics modes and sound techniques, etc. The landscape is pretty well mapped out, but people still manage to find new ways to look at it every now and then.

I've always wanted an Apple IIgs, because it had a built-in FM synth that was really powerful for the time (I have a fascination with electronic music and equipment from that era, which is why I have the C64 and MSSIAH, as well as a Gameboy with LSDJ). Maybe now is a good time to start looking around for one.

This is a fantastic story...I want to play with it, just because.

"I tinker with a Commodore 64 (a real one) now and then, and I'm just blown away by the community that still exists around it."

I am curious - is there an analog in the c64 world to this new ProDOS 2.4 release ?

That is to say, have enthusiasts reworked and re-released the built-in c64 firmware or otherwise reworked the OS ?

ProDOS is not firmware, as I understand it. It is disk-loaded.

Many of the Flash-based disk drives for C64 have a DOS shell that includes the CMD disk and file management functions (CMD made hard disks for C64 back in the day), and a bunch of other DOS enhancements built in. So, yeah, kinda; I think it's as close as one could get to being the same. C64 never had a disk-loaded DOS, as the DOS was built into the disk drives themselves (often enhanced by cartridges or a pluggable firmware called JiffyDOS from CMD), so there is not a direct parallel to ProDOS. But, certainly the enhancements from a bunch of places have become widely available to anyone still using the platform with any modern upgrades.

So, yes, you can work with directories and large collections of files, today, that could not be worked with on original hardware (and realistically there wasn't enough room on disks to need good file handling and directory support in the DOS back then). There's also a shell that makes common operations a lot nicer.

Edit: I think it might be worth explaining for folks who weren't around the first time that DOS stands for "disk operating system", and it was exactly that...it made disk drives work, and provided commands for working with files on disks. The OS itself, on both C64 and Apple, was mostly in the firmware, and was mostly just the BASIC programming language and some boot routines to setup the hardware for software to use. There was no protected mode, and no real notion of APIs, as provided by Operating Systems today. Many C64 programs would map over the built-in ROM, and remove what built-in functionality the OS did provide (like BASIC) in order to get more usable RAM. GEOS was perhaps the closest analog to a modern operating system for those old 8 bit systems; in that it had an API and did provide an abstraction of the hardware, to a small degree. Apple loaded more from disk than the C64 did, in the general case; making it more flexible, but also slower to start up.

Looks like Geos for the C64 has recently been reverse engineered and is now available on GitHub. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)#... https://github.com/mist64/geos

The C64 firmware was mapped out in detail when the C64 was in its heyday - you had books published with full commented disassembly. And because the C64 had the full 64K RAM, but used bank switching to overlay the ROMs, there were tons of "OS upgrades" that simply mirrored the ROM into the underlying RAM, made various modifications, and bank switched the ROMs out.

So yes there was, but most of hit happened 20-30 years ago already.

There were tons of commercial expansions based on this method, such as Simons' BASIC, and the far more ambitious Lightning/White Lightning, which I believe started as a Forth system, and was ported to other platforms too, but also came in a BASIC version. On the C64 - I don't know how different e.g. the Spectrum version was - it allowed multitasking up to 3 or 4 BASIC programs + sprite animation, and offered a lot of extensions for graphics and sound.

Many of these extensions led to equivalent ones written by enthusiasts or published with source in various books. E.g. a number of the books available here [1] have such extensions in them.

Later you got things like GEOS that provided a fully windowed user interface with word processor, spreadsheet, ide's etc. GEOS only really worked decently if you got a hard drive or RAM expansion, though, both of which were rare.

The most common "OS rework" on the C64, though, were freezer cartridges. So named because they had a "freeze" button that would jump into the code on the cartridge without touching anything in main memory, and let you mess around with it, and then restore the original state or dump everything to disk. Which made things like copying games fairly trivial most of the time, but also allowed for things like semi-automated "trainers" (you'd freeze, enable an option, go back into a game, lose a life, freeze again, and the cartridge would scan memory looking for memory locations that were likely locations of life counters, and scan for code that modified them).

There were a bunch of them, with Action Replay and The Final Cartridge being the most popular brands. Action Replay VI being the last one or the C64, but there are Action Replay cartridges and even PC expansion cards for a bunch of other platforms. The Final Cartridge ironically was also released in multiple version, with The Final Cartridge III also including a windowed user interface (which did not end up getting used much, as only very rudimentary software was included and hardly any third party software supported it).

In terms of contemporary stuff, there's the C64 version of Contiki [2] at least, and I'm sure there's more.

[1] http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/books.htm [2] https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Contiki

If you're interested in the sound synthesis capabilities of the Apple IIGS, you should skip the emulators and go straight to the real thing if you can. It appears that most emulators don't do a good job of emulating the Ensoniq chip. Check out this demonstration of a few emulators compared to a real IIGS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y10Wn0JVnXk

The Apple IIgs is still cheap to acquire and fun to own, so I recommend picking one up.

I'm currently living in an RV, so my space is very limited. I'd have to get rid of something in order to make room for it! If I buy some land and put a tiny house and studio on it, I'll definitely pick one up. There's a bunch of old hardware I'd love to have, but it's definitely a hobby for someone with some extra space (and also extra time, which I also don't have a lot of lately).

LSDJ is fantastic. It really is the software for composing chiptunes. And it's so cheap!

Of course, the hardware will cost you ~$100 (GB, GBC, or GBASP, flashcart, and flasher). So there's that.

If my old Apple //e wasn't 650 miles away in dad's attic I'd be dragging it out tonight to try this...

Well, I'd probably have to figure out how to get it on a 5.25 floppy first.

Wow. This brings back memories of my first job at Apple working on the IIe emulation board for the Mac LC.

Would love to hear more also! Did you have any involvement with 'Gus', the IIgs emulator written (but never publicly released) by Apple?

Write a blog post!

Sounds similar to the China Dos Union MS-DOS "7.1" which used the DOS from Windows 98 and included FAT32 support, long file names and a CD-based installer.

https://winworldpc.com/product/ms-dos/7x

I remember coming across that many years ago, as far as I remember it was a rather interesting group of Chinese DOS-using hobbyists. They also came up with a "Windows 3.2" that fit on a floppy and was also based on the 7.1, creating possibly the only 3.x version of Windows with long filename support. The latter was released under the name "PMWIN3.ZIP" and apparently can only be found in the Internet archives now: http://web.archive.org/web/20070128175800/http://www.cn-dos....

(The rest of cn-dos.net is also worth checking out if you read Chinese or find Google Translate to be sufficient; this is an example of one of the forgotten-yet-very-interesting parts of the Internet.)

Interesting, do the open-file dialogues and winfile support LFNs in this ? (@ work and can't look right now).

Yes:

http://reboot.pro/uploads/monthly_04_2008/post-5-1208637282....

I'm not sure how they did it though, maybe when I have the time I'll look into it since this is a very unusual software.

probably copied the NT3.5 file manager and hacked it to work with win32s? that's probably easier than modifying the win3.11 binaries to hold file name buffers than what's needed for the 8.3 scheme.

(or maybe they binaries are actually pretty similar, so all it needed was a slight API change for file name lookup)

7.1 wasn't just a version number that China DOS Union made up but is the actual version number of win98's (and 95 OSR 2's) DOS.

This is most likely derived from the Apple DOS source code that was released a while back, with new features added. This makes it quite different from the MS-DOS you describe, which is just a repackaging of components from Windows 98.

http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/apple-ii-dos-source-cod...

There is very little code in common between Apple DOS and Apple ProDOS. A disassembly of ProDOS is much more likely.

Old apple stuff isn't my thing but I applaud any efforts to preserve our history. Jason makes a number of good points about the sorry state of modern OSes in his article, and it's worth a read for that alone.

Cool thing: author of the article publishes his own release notes/announcement on archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/ProDOS_2_4

This should be a thing: for the stuff that matters, that we want to survive, make sure to cross-post on archive.org and then let's get us a sustainable IPFS network going.

Well of course he x-posts to archive.org. He's Jason Scott.

Am I the only one who didn't initially realize that Jason Scott and Sketch The Cow were one and the same? I mean, I even know the origin of the username. It seems like the sort of thing I should have realized.

Along the same lines there's an "unofficial service pack" for Windows 98SE which fixes a lot of little issues and actually allows running some substantially newer applications on the 18-year-old OS. I wouldn't be surprised if 2K/XP get the same treatment, and in fact I know it's already happening. It's sometimes amazing what the community can come up with.

I wish one could force vendors to open source operating systems they no longer support.

Indeed; what happened to systems like DR DOS, BeOS, and AmigaOS is a disgrace. DR DOS is still "supported" in the sense that you can pay for a copy from the ostensible rights holder, but the company doesn't appear to provide any actual development or support services, and it looks like they haven't issued a press release since 2004. DR DOS source is also out there, but only licensed for noncommercial use.

I was trying to look at this the other day... who actually owns DrDOS these days ?

Also, where is the newest version of the source ?

As far as I can tell, it's owned by DR DOS Inc. which also had a d/b/a "DeviceLogics" that now seems to be defunct (inasmuch as devicelogics.com now redirects to drdos.com). However, the status isn't exactly obvious to me.

The only source release I know of that is still readily downloadable is at drdos.net, which is version 7.01.

Oh yes! Then we could get the source to Mac OS 9 and bring it into the modern era! Spatial metaphor forever!

Imagine a fork of various Apple OS's that took skeuomorphic interfaces to their logical conclusion!

We need a name for this: an open set of parallel computing universes. Maybe OpenCandide: The Best of All Possible Worlds. (Ironic misinterpretation of the phrase intentional.)

I'm not sure if you were implying otherwise or not, but: spatial metaphor file managers are not skeuomorphic. Skeuomorphism strictly encompasses non-functional interface elements, such as faux-leather stitching on Apple's old address book application. The spatial metaphor Finder in OS 9 was 100% functional.

The way it remembered all of the details (size, layout, position, display mode) of each window and the way each window had an unbreakable 1 to 1 connection to a folder made it a joy to use. It allowed the user to identify what window belonged to a folder at a glance and to be able to set up a whole workspace arrangement and have it be remembered automatically by the Finder.

Back when Nautilus went spacial, I took the time to learn it, and quite liked it.

Also - being able to set wallpapers in the windows, set the icons to whatever size all lent to the spacial experience.

It would be interesting to have a system where getting a software patent required publishing working code under public domain. Then when the patent expires, it's open for all.

By the time (20 years) a patent expires, it is likely that whatever it covers is obsolete.

Which is arguably the point: the patent term should cover the likely amount of time that commercial exploitation is most advantaged by a government granted temporary monopoly. Obsolescence is pretty clearly a point where commercial exploitation is (severely) disadvantaged. The goal for patents was that for that temporary leg up (and today's 20 years starts to feel a lot less temporary) the company had to make all the information and science and schematics public domain. It's not a bad idea that if software/software algorithms are patentable the actual code should fall under that public domain disclosure. The balancing act that remains is the question of how much code is "schematics" and how much of it is "final product" and how much protection products deserve versus schematics...

>I wouldn't be surprised if 2K/XP get the same treatment

there was http://opennt.net/ (https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33250) rebuilding NT/XP using leaked code, but it went dark, so did the github repo hosting leaked code

edit: snapshot just before it went dark: http://web.archive.org/web/20151203004051/http://www.opennt....

http://web.archive.org/web/20151203004100/http://file.opennt...

"I wouldn't be surprised if 2K/XP get the same treatment"

What sticks out in my mind about win2k was the lack of USB support. I am aware of a third party, commercial option to add USB support to win2k - is there a free/open alternative ?

W2K did have USB support, but probably does not have USB 2 or USB3 support.

Not 3, but USB 2.0 has been around since 2000, so definitely within the support period of 2K (and 98SE/ME as well.) The drivers for the bus/controller are officially available, but finding USB device drivers for newer devices that work, however, is a different matter.

Ohhh ... I think I must have been thinking of NT4 which did not have USB support:

http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt4-usb-driver.html

Here's an interesting retweet from ProDOS's author last month.

   @JBrooksBSI
   [59]Aug 17
   Was MS-DOS copied from CP/M? 
   [60]embedded.com/electronics-bl...

   60. https://t.co/mOR5mLBHwC

http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/say-what-/4442498/...

"My conclusion is that DOS source code was not copied from CP/M source code."

"The commands were not copied; they were simple, descriptive terms that were common to other operating system such as VMS and Apple DOS."

"The DOS system calls were definitely copied from the CP/M system calls. Given the quantity of identical numbers representing identical functions, it is clear that Tim Paterson referenced the CP/M manual when writing DOS."

The last bit is alluded to in page D-7 of the DOS 1.0 user manual[1], which says "There is an additional mechanism for pre-existing programs that were written with different calling conventions. The function number is placed in the CL register...and an intrasegment call is made to location 5 in the current code segment." That's because in CP/M, "...access to the FDOS functions is accomplished by passing a function number and information address through the primary point at location BOOT+0005H" [2].

[1] https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibmpcdos61_7006095

[2] http://www.gaby.de/cpm/manuals/archive/cpm22htm/ch5.htm#Sect...

So, yes, the DOS function calls were designed with CP/M backwards compatibility in mind, and it says so right in the manual. Kind of.

Another heroic effort was the posthumous release of Star Fox II. A community took the Japanese alpha of Star Fox II, patched all the bugs, made it fully playable, and translated it into English. I finished it and I can tell you it was better than Star Fox 64.

I love this kind of stuff! Related is the reverse engineered GEOS (C64) available at github: https://github.com/mist64/geos

The maintainers are gearing up to support more platforms, CPUs, repair and extend!

Hmm, Still looks like it has the 32M (IIRC) partition limit. There are GSOS drivers to work around this, but not for generic 8-bit prodos (AFAIK).

Frankly, the II line was always slow moving (the IIE was sold commercially longer than any other computer without any significant upgrades). Which is why was such a great learning computer, there were only a couple models, very well documented, and hacked on to uncover every tiny little trick/edge case. Now days, I look at 6502 assembly and wonder how I managed to get anything done with such a restrictive stack/etc.

Thank you John Brooks!! You are the best!!

Warning: this is going to get mushy...

While my first computer was the TRS-80 COCO I, I spent more time coding on my second computer, the Apple IIe, coming home each afternoon after school to just program and play games constantly. I owe my current occupation to that, and my family and friends that benefit from my salary I all owe to those two computers.

I love the Apple II line along with the TRS-80 COCO line and my heart is full that there are those that continue to develop for them.

So how does one fix bugs in ProDOS 2.0.3? I assume John Brooks does not have the ProDOS source code. Is he patching the old binaries?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that ProDOS was originally written directly in assembly and not compiled from a higher-level language.

Disassembling is pretty trivial compared to de-compiling.

Interesting read, but no mention at all of what this thing is, or will be, used for. Anyone?

My memory of 30 years ago is a bit rusty, but I don't recall an easy way to format an Apple II disk without putting either Apple DOS or Apple ProDOS on the disk. This version is smaller, more widely compatible, and adds several third-party add-on features to ProDOS.

So, it's useful any time you'd format a disk in your Apple II emulator. Now you get more utilities, and you disk works on a wider variety of hardware.

FTA, on why this is important:

Next is that this is an operating system upgrade free of commercial and marketing constraints and drives. Compared with, say, an iOS upgrade that trumpets the addition of a search function or blares out a proud announcement that they broke maps because Google kissed another boy at recess. Or Windows 10, the 1968 Democratic Convention Riot of Operating Systems, which was designed from the ground up to be compatible with a variety of mobile/tablet products that are on the way out, and which were shoved down the throats of current users with a cajoling, insulting methodology with misleading opt-out routes and freakier and freakier fake-countdowns.

So true. :/

> blares out a proud announcement that they broke maps because Google kissed another boy at recess

Sure, if by "broke", you mean "built a privacy-respecting competitor based on a well-trusted open map technology called OpenStreetMap", and if by "kissed another boy", you mean "withheld turn-by-turn navigation because Apple wouldn't let Google whore out end-users private information as part of the process"..,

Most of my friends still think Apple Maps is a complete failure of a product because of their badly received launch. I'm always able to get them admit that Apple Maps' satellite data is far superior when I show them the side by side (try the satellite + map tilt in a major city or try the 3d tours).

This is purely anecdotal, but I've used apple maps twice this year (accidentally - search for maps and hit the wrong icon) and it's taken me to the wrong place both times. I live just outside of a major metropolitan area; suburban but not rural by any stretch of the imagination.

I've never had Google Maps take me to the wrong place. At the end of the day, getting where I want to go is the primary concern. If they product doesn't work consistently then I'm just not going to use it. Hopefully my experience is not typical.

I've been so astounded by Apple Maps' consistently bad routing that I actually have a recurring todo item every three weeks that says "Try Apple Maps". It has fired 37 times so far, and out of those 37 times that I've tried it (each time I wait until I have a not-used-before destination to try with), Maps has routed me to the wrong place (and I only count it as wrong if it's more than, say, a mile away) 11 times.

"My days of not taking Apple Maps seriously are definitely coming to a middle."

If Google maps (I presume) is working well enough for you, why are you trying so hard to switch to Apple Maps? :)

Mainly for my own amusement, and partially for Siri integration.

Four years after its release, Apple Maps still puts my address in the wrong location.

Whenever I have a Lyft or Uber driver come to my house to pick me up, I always have to text them "please only use Google Maps, do not use Apple or Waze" (Waze has its own issues, which I've written about before).

Have you tried using the "Report a Problem" feature? The last few times I did so, I got pleasantly quick responses (well, quick by huge company standards, i.e. a week or so).

I don't own any Apple products. My problems with Apple Maps come from Uber and Lyft drivers using it.

What, do I go to the Apple Store just so I can report a problem with an iPhone there? Will it even work since I don't have an Apple account to do it with?

Apple Maps had completely missed a reworking of a major intersection in Kalamazoo, MI, which was fairly confusing. On the other hand, Google Maps drains my battery like mad unless I force it to quit, so I don't even open it anymore.

Mob opinion is generally not the best gauge of reality.

Look at all the shit people are posting about Apple removing an ancient analog audio port, vs how many people are posting about Samsung the phone that self combusts.

Note 7 blow rate: 0.01% IPhone 7 jackless rate: 100% If my calculations are correct, then about 10000x more people should write about Apple's jack crucifixion.

Also, technology is not "ancient" just because it's 50 years old. Electric motor is over 180 years old, and that's not ancient. It's not ancient if it's used everywhere. If it's used everywhere, it's called modern.

I'd defend apples move to remove the headphone jack if that coincided with a move to a standard jack. But they didn't do that, I don't personally like Bluetooth headphones (one more thing to charge), and so what, now I need headphones that work with only one thing?

And there is no equivalent port on their laptops, so I can't even use the same headphones with my laptop?!

This is annoying, and the new usb spec is fine as a replacement for lightening. I am a very frustrated Apple customer, and it has me for the first time considering not buying another of their phones.

> IPhone 7 backless rate: 100%

iPhone 7 included adapter rate: 100%.

If a phone blowing up is not something to be concerned with (ignoring all the Airlines and government departments telling people to turn them off while flying), then a removed audio port shouldn't even factor into your consciousness when you consider that they give you the adapter for free.

> Also, technology is not "ancient" just because it's 50 years old.

In the world of consumer electronics, 50 years is ancient.

At the end of the day the way the 3.5mm jack is used in 2016 is the ultimate hack-on-a-hack-on-a-hack. The plugs are all the same size, but they could have anywhere from 2 to 5 contact points, depending on device type/manufacturer.

It worked for a while, but at some point you have to move on, and someone has to be the first to move. As I said in another comment, Apple has always been ahead of the pack when it comes to adopting new technology and dropping legacy technology.

> Electric motor is over 180 years old, and that's not ancient. It's not ancient if it's used everywhere. If it's used everywhere, it's called modern

No, if its used everywhere its called "popular" or "ubiquitous".

An electric motor can be modern, if it's a new/recent design. That doesn't make all electric motors modern.

> iPhone 7 included adapter rate: 100%.

iPhone 1-7 requires proprietary connector rate: 100%.

> It worked for a while, but at some point you have to move > on, and someone has to be the first to move. As I said in > another comment, Apple has always been ahead of the pack > when it comes to adopting new technology and dropping > legacy technology.

That'd be a great argument if what Apple was providing was objectively BETTER than the status quo. However, I'd wager that most people wouldn't call needing an adapter to utilize off the shelf headphones they already own or having to buy very expensive ones that will only work on SOME Apple products (not every Mac comes with a proprietary Lightning port) an improvement.

It's a pity too because I was seriously considering making the switch over to an iPhone next year, but then Apple goes and reminds how poorly they play with others.

EDIT: Oh and I almost forgot, want to charge your phone and use wired headphones at the same time? Better buy another adapter (not included).

>Apple has always been ahead of the pack when it comes to adopting new technology and dropping legacy technology.

Apple is only the latest company to remove the headphone jack.

The Le 2 range of devices from LeEco - http://www.androidauthority.com/first-phones-without-headpho...

Motorola Moto Z https://www.motorola.com/us/products/moto-z-droid-edition

And the Oppo R5 from 2014 http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/29/7091055/this-android-smar...

Degree to which my life would be affected by losing my mobile's headphones jack - slightly above zero, courtesy of, well, owning Bluetooth headphones. To be fair, I'm sufficiently middle class that I can afford Bose QC35s, but still.

Degree to which my life would be affected if my apartment burnt down - uh, lots.

Now, there are plenty of other great reasons why I refuse to buy Apple products and stick with the platform that at least gives me some level of Software Freedom. Getting rid of the headphones jack? Doesn't rate particularly highly there.

Then you will be reassured that the number of appartment that burnt down due to Samsung Note 7 is zero.

You may also appreciate that Samgsung's fiasco was unintentional, while Apple's choice was deliberate. One is a PR and product disaster, while the other is a cash grab. Conflating issues just because they happened to rival company with loud fan base is dubious.

Well thank Jeebus it was only CARS that burnt to a pile of scrap and not apartments. I'm all turned around on the matter now.

Apple does seem to create more buzz about things in general (it's their way of marketing, for good or evil) but as for me, the Samsung issue is "Li-ion cells are volatile, sometimes there are bad batches" is not a story. We knew that.. Meanwhile, "the death of analog, open standards" is worth discussing.

Right. A hand-held ticking time bomb is a non-story.

An ancient audio port being migrated to a $9 adapter is the end of days.

> Meanwhile, "the death of analog, open standards" is worth discussing.

Just like the death of the standard floppy disc. And the death of the standard optical disc. And the death of the standard parallel and serial ports. The death of the standard PS2 port.

Motorola released a phone earlier this year with no analog 3.5mm jack. Where was the overreaction, the ridiculous petitions and bullshit we see whenever Apple does something?

I could go through and refute all of your points with what I believe, but that's just proving my point - there are differing opinions on the matter so it's worth discussing.

Nobody is taking the stance that Samsung batteries exploding is a Good Thing. And it's not as if the story doesn't have traction - I'm seeing jokes all over the place about exploding Samsungs. Until someone unearths a story about wilfil negligence (such as when Capacitor Plague was being caused by failed industrial espionage), there's just not much to discuss. We already had the Chinese Batteries discussion recently with the hoverboards.

> Where was the overreaction, the ridiculous petitions and bullshit we see whenever Apple does something

I addressed this - Apple's marketing is to create massive buzz and expectations with marketing like "perfection" and "magical". Of course there's going to be backlash. They revel in it. They used to market themselves as "the crazy ones".

edit: also, Apple also has far bigger market mindshare than Motorola. They alone have the power to bifurcate a market into proprietary standards. With the Motorola phone, people just go "eh" and buy a Samsung. With the Apple, they're still breaking sales records.

Anyone who seriously works in networking still needs serial ports all pro grade networking gear uses it for console and OOB connectivity to the AUX ports (in ciscos case)

You also need serial ports today for low level kernel debugging, hardware bring up, and embedded systems. I have worked for 5 different companies over my career doing embedded systems. Serial ports were important in 5/5 companies.

I would love if my Macbook had a serial port. I use it all the time. I would never demand Apple add a serial port though.

And I'd be willing to bet a decent number of people in that position use a USB to Serial dongle.

Which is not 100% reliable and can cause data corruption.

The floppy drive died after a significant fraction of the users stopped relying on floppies. Similarly discs were made unpopular by streaming before the CD drive died. Most people I know still plug in their head phones and most new headphones sold still have a cable.

> The floppy drive died after a significant fraction of the users stopped relying on floppies. Similarly discs were made unpopular by streaming before the CD drive died.

My point was that Apple dropped all of those things while the "mainstream PC" industry was still shipping them as standard items.

> most new headphones sold still have a cable

cough "Bluetooth headphones account for 54 percent of U.S. dollar sales in the category, according to NPD"

https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/20...

By dollar sales? Hah!!!

Seriously if it is by revenue that means there are at least a hundred times more people using $10 quite decent wired headphones.

Me included. I don't want blue tooth headphones. Ever!! Can I make it more clear?

There is no comparison possible between a bad battery problem in one particular phone and headphone jack removal.

The fact is Apple has a very long tradition of making every part of their ecosystem more proprietary over time and fucking their own customers over along the way.

Just consider the lightning port. As if it wasn't bad enough they refused to use the ancient industry standard micro USB in the first place, they then went on to screw over their own customers by changing their own connector

As far as the floppy drive, a lot of us had long since dropped it in the PC industry even if charitable vendors were courageous enough to offer long term to support to customers who may still have had a legacy requirement at the time.

My noise cancelling headsets are ostensibly Bluetooth, but it doesn't mean I ever use them with anything other than a cable.

>Just like the death of the standard floppy disc. And the death of the standard optical disc. And [...] //

I think in all those situations an alternative newer option was made and existed in parallel gradually gaining support until the other older tech wasn't needed.

Personally I don't think I've ever seen anyone using wireless earbuds despite Bluetooth having been around a long time. Bluetooth earpieces for phone calls were common for a while, but more recently I've seen more people use a wired mic on their earphone cable.

It does seem likely to me that we'll move wireless with ear-buds but this transition seems much more forced than the others you've cited.

Yes, what kind of loser still uses that ancient audio port

hides headphones that don't require charging in drawer

That's because unless your Samsung actually blows you up there isn't a perceivable effect vs making me have to buy new headphones if I get the latest iPhone.

> That's because unless your Samsung actually blows you up there isn't a perceivable effect

There is a real risk of the Samsung causing a great deal of damage and/or injury. It's been fucking banned by most major airlines because of the risk, and after much typical Samsung fucking about, have issued a full recall.

> vs making me have to buy new headphones if I get the latest iPhone.

Why. Why do you need to buy new headphones?

Either you

a) genuinely aren't aware they include a Lightning to 3.5mm adapter in the box, but somehow feel the need to comment about an aspect you've apparently spent 0 seconds researching; or

b) you know damn well they include an adapter and you're being disingenuous.

This type of thing is exactly what I'm talking about. You downplay a literal health and safety risk "eh, it won't happen to me" but trump up complaints about "i can't use my headphones" which are not even accurate.

Samsung's bad battery does not absolve Apple of sin. Yes, I know they include an adapter. This adapter is a kludge--meaning it adds size and yet another point of failure. More important, when that adapter is used I cannot charge the phone, which means I can't use an iPhone 7 to play music in my car on long road trips. (I have an excellent car audio system, and it has no bluetooth). Without buying yet another kludgy adapter which is manifestly not in the box.

Including the jack to lightning adapter appears to me like a contradiction: it's like saying "we remove the audio jack but we know that you need it".

More like, "We know you might need it." I plug audio in quite infrequently on my Note as I use bluetooth most of the time. Kill them for introducing a new, proprietary standard for wireless audio, but not for removing the jack which in my case is just a dust magnet which frequently requires a cleanout to solve the blocked proximity sensor problem.

>a new, proprietary standard for wireless audio

Isn't it just Bluetooth?

You're right. I guess the way they pitched it, given their track record I was just assuming. That being said, I'm not sure what they did that was so world-changing with wireless connectivity since I never had the bluetooth connection problems that they say everybody has.

So you can switch a bluetooth device from your phone to your laptop without some weird dance?

To me, that's the real magic. Pairing is obviously very slick, but being able to seamlessly transition between host devices is huge.

With the later versions of bluetooth I don't have a problem with that. Also, we haven't seen this in the wild yet so I'll reserve judgement and praise.

Yep. The 3.5mm audio jack comes in the box, so they didn't really remove it, they just moved it off-device. Maybe they could move the battery off-device too and make the iPhone 8 even thinner.

Your complaint is that they're including a free adaptor?

I know its "cool" to be anti-Apple, but you're clutching at straws.

> I know its "cool" to be anti-Apple

I sincerely doubt that someone would be anti-Apple on HN just because it's cool. What Apple is doing is a conscious choice of direction, which has a lot of potential for discussion.

What Samsung did is catastrophic, yes. However, it doesn't have any depth for discussion. Yes they messed up big time, and yes the situation has been down-played, but in the end, it affects Samsung market share and the health of the poor people who got affected. Discussing the market-share of Samsung and their policies doesn't have any meaning, and for the people, you can only hope that the authorities take enough precautions.

On the other hand, Apple has been making decisions, which, in the end, can affect far more many people, regardless of their usage of Apple products, in a good or bad way, for a far longer term. It is a statement, at the very least.

Or maybe I'm exaggerating, that's also possible.

No, my complain is that they're removing a standard port in favour of their own propietary alternative while they know that a lot of users would be more comfortable with the standard one. I also think that using the lightinig port has no real advantage over the audio jack but I admittedly don't know much about lightning, so maybe somebody can prove me wrong. (Removing a component from the phone isn't in my opinion an advantage because the audio jack uses a very tiny space and removing it gives you far less choices if you want to buy a new pair of headphones).

This is silly. I know me - I lose stuff, I don't need one extra thing to lose, and I am not buying lightning headphones.

> a) genuinely aren't aware they include a Lightning to 3.5mm adapter in the box, but somehow feel the need to comment about an aspect you've apparently spent 0 seconds researching; or

You've posted about the adapter multiple times now, but unless the adapter has the 3.5mm jack and a power connector allowing a person to use their head phones and charge the phone simultaneously it's not equivalent of the existing functionality.

Perhaps they plugin a battery pack when they're using their headphones? Can't just be me that does that.

Samsung actually blowing up also has no effect on you if you're an iPhone/iOS user and want to update your device for the ecosystem.

Apple's satellite data is terrible when I try it. It still shows my house as a big hole in the ground, for example.

Apple Maps is good enough now to get the job done, but it still kind of sucks.

Apple Maps for me is still broken. It seems to ignore every business and casino on the local reservations. It tells me the nearest gas station is in the next town over but the two on the reservation are not listed. It continues give me local weather for a different town with the GPS. I guess I should feel better that the seat of government for the reservation is once again listed as a town.

I still think Apple Maps is a failure because it still utterly blows here in Japan (either their POI data or the search engine is complete crap since it STILL sends me across the country for basic searches). Google Maps has its problems as well (I prefer using local apps if I'm doing car navigation) but Apple Maps is just a complete joke here.

Apple Maps is also garbage in Iceland. One example: Google Maps has walking paths in Reykjavík and Apple doesn't have them at all. For someone who doesn't have a car here (me) that's kind of important.

The car-centricness of Apple Maps is also a problem in Japan. The original release was absolutely ridiculous (it showed the biggest train station in Japan as a park!), and while they fixed the most embarrassing issues, it still deprioritises public transport so you often have to zoom in to ridiculous levels to see train stations, where here they're the main mode of transport so they should have priority over, say, shops.

Oh yeah, I forgot Apple Maps doesn't have bus stops here at all either. Google Maps only draws them when you're zoomed way in, but at least they're there.

Not exactly the primary features of such a mobile app for most people .)

Apple Maps isn't based on OSM any more than it's based on TomTom, etc

Apple use data from both OSM and TomTom, amongst others.

It turns out they use OSM less than I thought they do (iPhone for iOS 5.x used OSM a more, when Maps.app used Google Maps still), but they definitely use it. The full list of attributions is at http://gspa21.ls.apple.com/html/attribution.html

Apple maps are based on OSM?

How did they get around their license?

http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

Are you implying that Apple's motivation in making their maps product was to fight the privacy abuses of a large, wealthy corporation?

Heh, for anyone momentarily confused as I was, FTA stands for 'from the article' and is not a comment by the Apple IIGS Free Tools Association. :)

Ha! I thought the F stood for something else. I guess in 1993 the world was a different place!

TFA? The fine article? ;-)

> Windows 10, the 1968 Democratic Convention Riot of Operating Systems

Excellent turn of phrase, I'll have to steal that.

For British readers, the analogy isn't Orgreave but Tony Blair: much shinier, genuinely a lot of improvements in the short term, unquestioningly loyal to US imperialism.

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