Comment by iheartpotatoes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iheartpotatoes | Hacker News Reader

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You are confusing so many things in your comment, that it is hard to decide where to start. I'll pick one.

> planned obsolescence

It amazes me that people keep using this term -- which was associated with washing machines in the 1940's -- to rant about buggy software and engineering improvements.

Stop perpetuating the myth. There is zero truth to it. (And before you say it: Slowing down older phones to account for battery decay and balance battery life is intentional and it PROLONGS the device ... exactly the opposite of planned obsolecense).

Apple does NOT plan to make your devices obsolete. I use an Ipod Mini from 2004 when I work out at the gym. It is 15 years old and works FINE. My iPhone 7 crashes weekly. Prior to that I used an iPhone 4 for six years until I kicked it down a storm drain. (Long story.)

> software bloat

OK. Two. This is due to technoculture determining how technology can be used. New features are added before old features are optimized, and software bloats and breaks. This is a result of pushing the boundaries of tech. Some features will survive the evolution, some will not. But it is not intentional, it is a side effect of insanely rapid development and productization due to customer demand.

No one has a gun to your head making you buy they latest tech. As long as people demand the latest and greatest, the industry will rush to provide. This is a consequence of accelerated innovation.

>Apple does NOT plan to make your devices obsolete.

Running on an upgraded late 2008 MacBook and running Mojave, but only thanks to people keeping it compatable as a hobby. According to Apple, this setup is obsolete and incompatable with Mojave.

How long do you think is a reasonable duration for Apple to promise to keep an operating system backported to old hardware?

I don't think there is a strict time cutoff, depends entirely on the hardware.

In this case, they bothered to make this thing with decent build quality and for that I thank them. It is even easily upgradable and the battery is accessable.

However, if I want dev tools to work on it, Apple requires me to use their recent OS, which they claim will not run on this hardware.

Now if they had a good point economically and it was a massive ballache requiring a lot of resources, then fair enough. But the patching utility appears to be the work of one person in their spare time, which in the grand scheme of things, especially since Apple is hardly strapped for cash and resources, does look like Apple have decided to economically obsolete this machine for reasons that have very little to do with it being technically obsolete.

Should they just stop adding features to their operating system because somebody has hardware from 11 years ago, though? More features means more resource usage, more resources aren't something you can fix with software. Hardware today isn't the same as what existed back then.

>more resources aren't something you can fix with software.

That's why I put more ram in it.

A laptop from 2008 will still run Windows 10, including the features that are not allowed on but the more modern Macbook laptops like night light.

Sandy Bridge laptops are not supported by Mojave and up, but will probably be softwarematically fine while continuing to get more features while running the latest versions of Linux or Windows. Amazing technologies like changing your wallpaper over the course of the day (GNOME in the '00s onward) or making your screen yellow are all supposedly not functional on macOS on those Sandy Bridge laptops.

Many features don't require newer hardware.

How long is it reasonable?

One of the reasons I have heard about people buying Apple hardware is that it has great resale value.

So the answer is: Long enough to keep this true.

If Apple keeps its current path, people will stop buying Apple hardware and it will hurt Apple's bottom line.

But yes, I concede they have the money to make mistakes for about 20 years. So they do make the mistakes.

If a company X doesn't want to support something, then they should open it (source code, hardware specs, ...) so someone else can continue to support it. Always having to trash something that is working fine is stupid.

For example, I have an old iPad2 (last Apple device I bought) that is working perfectly (the hardware). But I'm not able to install anything "new" on it because iOS 9 is no more supported by applications. Why Apple doesn't open specifications so i can install Linux on it to extends its life for many years to come?

I take an example from Apple but it's applicable to ANY companies.

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