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Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

So you want perpetual free updates? I think your expectations might be a tad unrealistic.

It should be built into the initial price. And perpetual is unrealistic, but 10 years is not.

Microsoft provides 5 years of Mainstream Support and 5 years of Extended Support at no additional cost (cost is built into the initial license fee).

Heck, I would more trust software that says 10 years of garunteed support rather than lifetime support. Too many companies fudge the meaning of "lifetime", and 10 years blows Google's 2 + 1 years of Android support out of the water.

there's a huge difference between supporting the version that they sold you for a specific version of ios and writing a new version to work with future changes to ios (which they don't in any way control)

Not really. As an iOS user I am forced to update the os for software to be supported and receive new security updates.

That Apple makes previous versions of my installed software incompatible when I do upgrade should not be my problem.

(That said, I agree there is a problem here, and I think Apple should ultimately be the one who fixes it)

No, they shouldn't, they should throw away legacy code as they've been doing ever since.

> Microsoft provides 5 years of Mainstream Support and 5 years of Extended Support at no additional cost (cost is built into the initial license fee).

For Windows perhaps, but they sell Office as a yearly subscription.

They also sell it with a perpetual license. I own licenses for Office 2003, 2007, 2013, and 2016.

(Office 2016 works well on Linux with Crossover. Just bought a Crossover lifetime license. Crossover has a decent subscription/license working - subscription is for updates, you can continue using indefinately if you stop paying. Although it is a little expensive.)

> It should be built into the initial price. And perpetual is unrealistic, but 10 years is not.

That mechanism is not built into the apple app store, which is why they cannot offer it.

10 years is a long time. Over its lifetime, Apple has changed the Mac's CPU architecture every 10 years. (They've been on Intel for 11 years now, the longest of any, but there's been rumors of another migration for a couple years now.) Needing to support Mac software for 10 years, then, means supporting your users through an architecture change.

There's probably not much platform-specific code in a password manager, but what are the odds it'll work perfectly under their next emulator, or that you can take such an old codebase and just recompile? 10 years ago, the old "pbproj" format was still supported, but the last Xcode that could open them was Xcode 3 (requires OS X 10.5 or 10.6).

Less than 10 years passed between the last Apple IIe sold by Apple and the first PowerMac G5. Or the last Newton to the first iPhone. Or the original Apple I to the Macintosh II. That timescale has big generational changes, and I don't agree that it's realistic for third-party developers to support software that long at no extra cost.

I'm sure there's a ton of people lining up to pay $400 for a password manager.

> It should be built into the initial price

Then it's going to be very expensive.

I made the mistake, years ago, of selling perpetually licensed desktop software with free updates - the economics really don't work, and it's a mistake I haven't made since.

But Windows support is limited to security and bug fixes, not feature updates. Not quite the same thing as getting a free upgrade to every major version of an application.

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