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Comment by smitherfield | Hacker News Reader

The arbitrary removal of 32-bit app support could be thought of as a heuristic to clear away abandonware. Which, for obvious reasons (security), Apple would like to have as little of in its App Store as possible. It also lets them aggressively deprecate and remove legacy APIs going forward.

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Someone was/is tracking "zombie apps"; the percentage of iOS apps that aren't/can't be found is huge, like well over 70%.

It's a longstanding practice at Apple. At some point hardware & software are old enough that not only are they not supported, they're pointedly ignored when some appropriate new development "breaks" them.

Other platforms garner some favor by supporting ancient software, but I've long seen the subtly crippling consequences of preserving such backwards compatibility.

I for one think that that's great. It helps encourage people to upgrade but it also makes things a lot easier to support. It's not friendly to the poor though. If you bought an older all aluminium macbook say in college and due to it being built like a tank you use it for 5+ years and it goes out of support what then if you're not making enough free cash to dole out on a 3k macbook?

I am admittedly pretty solidly middle-class, but I've never had a non-Apple computer last anywhere near 5+ years, so I'd say they were still getting a pretty decent deal relatively speaking.

But in any case Macs and iDevices are different; Macs tend to stay backwards-compatible for quite a while longer. 32-bit apps still work fine and will as long as Macs are on Intel processors. Even Carbon[1] apps still work (compiled as x86 binaries) on the latest MacOS, and those will also run (compiled as PPC binaries) on MacOS 8.1, from 1998.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)

Next year my mid 2013 MacBook Pro will be 5 years old and the thing still smokes most lesser PC laptops. The battery still has more than 50% of the charging cycles left and it all runs really well. I figure I’d keep it until it died which could be another 5 years.

You know. It just occurred due to me, due to your post, how convenient it must be to have every app using your APIs in one place like the app store.

Yeah lockin has huge advantages for the company.

It's great for asking "who uses this function" and "how do they use it"?

CPAN is used by the perl community to make lists of modules broken by new perl releases. They use this to find how intrusive proposed intentional changes are, as well as to find accidental breakage.

Take it further - they can look at all the apps in their App Store and make decisions like "Okay, lets improve this instruction set in the next ARM processor we make".

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