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Comment by ethagnawl | Hacker News Reader

Apple is actively hostile towards its customers and having to resort to hacks like this are one of the reasons I permanently moved to Linux about ten years ago.

I had a black Macbook (dual-core, maxed out RAM, etc.), which I liked very much and was plenty capable, and Apple decided (I don't have proof, but I'm almost certain it was an instance of planned obsolescence) that Lion (I think?) would not support it. I installed Ubuntu on that machine and it continued to work well until the screen died a few years later.

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Might have been planned obsolescence, but the reason Intel Core Duo was not supported by Lion was due to Finder being exclusively 64-bit, and thus the OS going 64-bit only. Only the early 2006 black MacBook was affected by this, as all the later ones used Intel Core 2 Duo.

That means the breaking update came five years after the release of the computer, but Snow Leopard still had another two years of security updates (AFAIK). Personally, I don't think that's unreasonable.

That's a fair retort.

This is just one instance among many, though. I'm aware of others both firsthand (e.g. my iPad Mini that can't be upgraded past iOS 9) and second (e.g. "slowing down" of old iPhones that resulted in a class action lawsuit).

Was it one of those old core duo Macbooks with the first intel onboard graphics? Those graphics were shit, Apple discarded them quickly and changed to Nvidia GF9400/9600, those Nvidia machines were officially supported from 2008 - 2015.

Yes, I believe it was. That's all well and good, but until the screen stopped working (may have been related, it's been a while) it was a perfectly good machine.

Snow Leopard didn't stop working after they introduced Lion. In fact it received security updates long after that, and programs like Chrome supported it for a very long time.

> planned obsolescence

Oh boy.

iOS 14 supports iPhone 6s. What’s the oldest phone supported by the latest Android?

Depends on whether you could XDA-Developers ;)

This discussion is about desktop OSes, not mobile.

I'm in the same boat. I have two Mac Pro 3.1 with dual Xeons and 32 GB/64 GB RAM. These are still very powerful computers and I love their internal build. Still, in order to run Mojave on them I had to resort to the patched version. These machines cost over $4000 each in their original configuration, so I'd expect Apple to show a bit more respect to their loyal customers. It's ridiculous that the same machine can run a competing operating system without any problem.

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