Comment by MintelIE | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MintelIE | Hacker News Reader

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I have simply stopped buying "apps" even though I am still an iOS user. Quite a few of my purchases have just disappeared over time. I moved to a newer device and they couldn't be installed. I'm not happy with Apple and I got rid of my modern Macs (still have 1/2 dozen SE/30s) completely, now I use Debian or OpenBSD.

Apple is extremely tight lipped on what they're doing and where they're going, they will support and then drop some technology on an apparent whim. I've had serious issues when they dropped WebObjects, Java as a first class Cocoa development language, and now moving to Swift seems like a message that all my work in Objective C will be thrown away by Apple. The promise of ZFS on OS X made me buy a Mac Pro, and then several months later they just dropped all mention of ZFS on OS X.

I'm not going to stick with a company which is so secretive about what they are going to do, failing to even publish roadmaps for their customers and developers. Mindshare among the tech geeks is how OS X took off. Now they're losing it - many developers I know are moving away from the platform too.

> and now moving to Swift seems like a message that all my work in Objective C will be thrown away by Apple

Totally.

Cocoa, Objective C, OpenGL, etc, are all going to die some day and Apple will announce it a year or two in advance like they usually do with major breaking stuff. Any serious company would announce these EOL 4-5 years in advance.

With Apple the only safe strategy is to keep investing dev time to update everything to the newer stuff or let the project die because in 2-3 years max it will most likely stop working.

It's no coincidence all big Mac apps (other than Apple's own stuff) are actually cross platform projects. No wonder Apple is trying to bring people over from iOS with Catalyst.

I was going to start a macOS product this year but with the transition to SwiftUI I decided it was a really bad idea to invest in a Cocoa project.

And Jesus don't get me started on having to update the OS to get the latest Xcode version every year with their half baked macOS versions.

I think we are meant to divine Apple’s plan from clues. Much of the Unix side of OS X or whatever it’s called now is getting pretty old, much apparently unchanged from years ago. So my guess is this stuff is going away sooner than later. They finally admitted that OpenGL is being deprecated but in retrospect we should have known this by 2010 at the absolute latest.

Since I no longer use OS X and haven’t installed the current or past few versions I couldn’t tell you what is being poorly maintained or ignored but my guess is a more familiar person could guess what Tim’s abandoning next with some scrutiny and a handful of yarrow stalks.

yes...

all this churn, and what do we get for it, we can loose our old apps, customers can get upset, devs large and small look for shortcuts because thier investment (obj-c, appkit, uikit, swift 1 - 4, 32-bit, etc etc) is obsoleted... it just reduces the number of viable apps... isnt the whole point of apis that they abstract the machine/os underneath so we dont have churn so much?

i know windows isnt the best thing ever, but lots of older apps just work, and i feel apple (and all of us) would be better served if they at least wrote better abstractions to support older apps (32bit runs in compatibility mode, etc)

Apple wouldn’t be Apple if they wouldn’t abandon old technologies in favor of newer ones.

This actually splits developer mindset into two camps: those who love the introduction of new stuff and deem it necessary to achieve progress, and those who accuse Apple of planning obsolescence into their products, and deprecating technologies too early (it’s a little bit hard too believe when you compare Android to iOS, but Linux or Windows vs. macOS tells a different story).

thats true, but at some point it goes so far it becomes an anti-pattern

apple, like any other company of thier size, can continue to move forward and drop old technologies while at the same time keeping older apps working; its eimply a matter of will and policy

They bailed on zfs when oracle bought sun. The semi opensource license sun distributed zfs under wasn’t good enough for Apple, so (I assume) they wanted an explicit license. I assume Oracle tried to milk as much as they could from Apple and apple walked.

From what I understand, a lot of apple engineers were really disappointed about dropping zfs. It’s sucks they can’t talk about it.

Send me an email if you’re willing to part with one of those SE/30s assuming it still works. I’ve been pining for a classic Mac to play with but the pickings on eBay are either all broken or really pricey.

They are part of my retirement fund.

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