Apple Shuts Down “My Photo Stream”
support.apple.com
support.apple.com
Apple is moving iCloud further into macOS and making the Mac more akin to an Apple Chromebook with every release. Time Machine gets little to no love, and users are getting steered ever more strongly towards backing up data onto iCloud.
Even buying an Apple device isn't really buying a device anymore. You're really buying a transferable lease for 6-7 years on a device that has a hard stop to go to landfill after that time due to software obsolescence by way of unpatched vulnerabilities.
I don't actually dislike Chromebooks at all, but this is saddening when you've bought a computer to use it as a computer and any sense of ownership or agency is quietly clawed away.
If you define a lease as a period of time where a device gets security patches, has this ever not been the case?
Windows XP got patches for over 10 years IIRC. It was a different time, but you did ask "ever"
And with previous generations of Windows there was nothing really stopping you from upgrading to a newer OS on the same old hardware - although you might run into serious performance issues with a modern Windows OS on 10+ year old hardware. But you could also switch to plenty of other OSes. I assume that's also an option for 7+ year old Macs?
The "landfill" comment was likely just about how software support periods have become so short, meaning for the current crop of computing devices (including actual computers, phones, tablets) the hardware itself almost always outlasts the company's support period for official software updates, which is disgraceful. I have drawers full of old phones that turn on, display is perfect/bright, battery is reasonably strong, can connect to WiFi, everything works, except the company threw their arms up and gave up on software support.
Well, sucks if you bought a Windows 10 device with an Intel 7th Gen processor in the first half of 2017. You will only be getting... ~8 years, just like Apple more or less; even if most PCs will probably last longer than that.
As for, "well we can install Linux..." that doesn't make even a measurable dent in e-waste.
You can still install Windows 11 on the 7th gen chip, they just don’t make it easy to encourage people to upgrade to secure systems. It’s not at all arbitrary though, in the way Apple culls supported machines.
"It’s not at all arbitrary though," - Literally Windows 11's launch was filled with months of controversy because the developers admitted the 8th Gen cutoff was arbitrary. Later we got some theories that it might have been MBEC support but not all supported processors have MBEC.
Only if you insist on thrashing the device after you're done with it. Be a sport an sell it or donate it to someone who will install Linux on it if you can't and you'll see that 'e-waste' (what a word...) problem disappear as quick as you can say 'linux'.
I'm one of those someone's by the way, not having bought any new laptop or server since 2001. I'm typing this on a 'late 2009' 27" iMac running Debian, parked next to a Thinkpad P-50 running Debian, traffic is going out through a virtual router on the DL380 G7 under the stairs running Debian. My children use machines running Debian as does my 85yo mother. Some of my friends have also seen the light and moved to Linux running on used machines, generally all it takes is to put an SSD in place of the spinning drive and the things 'fly'.
10.3 Panther required a G3 or better and USB, which (in laptop-land) dropped the pre-Lombard G3 Powerbooks from 1998. So the 2003 OS dropped 1998 machines, so just 4 years of coverage.
"Security vulnerabilities" weren't exactly the same thing in those days as they are today, with less online apps, but in a way it was also more obsolete more quickly because hardware moved quickly: you could have a 233Mhz to 300Mhz 1998 G3, but the new 2003 Powerbook G4s were clocked at 867Mhz-1.25Ghz - nearly 4x across the board.
I get more usage out of 5+ year old Macs now than I ever did in the past.
I'm still rocking an iPhone 7 Plus and it's still getting updates even though it's seven years old. If anything the main thing that seems like it'll make me upgrade eventually is the battery life. It's not lasting anywhere near as long as it used to.
Although it looks like I can still get that replaced from Apple, so I might just do that.
depending on what you do with it, it may work well enough for a while longer, but at some point, some activities won't be supported - banking/finance apps are the big ones I know will stop supporting earlier ios versions sooner or later. My bank's app requires ios 14 min. I suspect they may bump that to 15 or 16 in the next year or so.
I'm not saying it won't eventually happen, just that right now it seems to be working fine for everything I need it to do.
There is no “hard stop” on the life time of a Mac. Yeah Apple will eventually stop updating the software but this has always been true. If anything this situation is much better that it ever has been with free OS updates.
Finally even if there was a hard stop Apple will gladly recycle your product. No need for it to go to a landfill.
I know it's possible, and I have a janky solution myself, but it really seems like iCloud is the only way to go without going through lots of hoops and still having a solution that's imperfect at best.
If you’re really careful not to enter any bank/credit card/personal information it’s probably fine to use an unsupported laptop, but then you’re having to consider how much you trust your own computer which you didn’t before.
[ISL@home:~]$ lscpu | grep -i intel
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3330 CPU @ 3.00GHz
[ISL@home:~]$ uname -a
Linux home 6.1.0-6-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.15-1 (2023-03-05) x86_64 GNU/Linux
[ISL@home:~]$
It is a real bummer that the major hardware vendors choose not to open up their devices when they reach end of life. Phones and old hardware are frequently viable for double their enforced service-lives or longer.
I do kind of wonder if Linux’ real problem is just that the Venn diagram of things people care about is all over the place and Linux just fails at the edge cases.
I’ve used Linux for a bunch of projects, and use it every day in a VM for work, but I wouldn’t dare to use it for my daily driver and I don’t think my niche needs are ever likely to be something that gets picked up. Shame for me, but the nature of open-source.
macOS and Windows have a lot of features to lock user directories away from rogue software, and Macs have notarization and certificate revocation (which I believe is coming to Windows too unless I’m mistaken).
Notarization/revocation isn’t really philosophically FOSS compatible so I don’t ever see things like this making it’s way to Linux either.
The 2016 (first TouchBar year) is one of the shorter ones for newest-OS-support, only running up to macOS 12 (Monterey). That was released in 2021 and got its latest security update on 2023-06-21.
Going back further, the 2014 Macbook Pro supports macOS 11 (Big Sur), which was released in 2020 and also got a security update on 2023-06-21.
You have to go back to macOS 10.15 (Catalina) released in 2020 to find a version that hasn't had a security update this year. Which MBP models are stuck at Catalina? Mid 2012 to early 2013. That's 7-8 years with the newest OS, then another 2ish years of security updates.
10 years is far from perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than 6.
Windows is much better in that there aren’t yearly releases obsoleting machines every year. You can run the latest version of Windows 10 on hardware older than 10 years.
But for the first part, for a huge number of people all you need is a web browser and Microsoft office, which is supported on the 3 latest macOS versions, about the same window as the macOS security updates
Like I said it's not perfect but it's much better than 6 years
When you don’t patch out every serious known zero-day, there’s really no point patching any of them. The device is already compromised.
That means the updates are really only 6-7 years, with an arbitrary cessation.
There’s no reason that Apple should be stopping OS support for older devices unless there’s a compelling reason to do so.
Next year they’ll argue that macOS Whatever only supports Macs with secure enclaves to keep users safe, so that gives them a pass for 2024, but really it’s just continued forced obsolescence as they’ll carry on axing machines for no reason in 2025.
Being able to access the same files across MacOS and iOS without doing anything special is amazingly convenient.
Do you know if this works across shared drives too? Say one shares a 2tb plan with someone else; would both parties need the addition $10 “premier” plan to utilize 4tb?
On the other hand, I’d worry about this being getting patched and losing access. Seems like unintended behavior tbh
Is there a platform other than Linux that doesn't push integration with cloud services? Windows pushes OneDrive, and Google pushes Google Drive on their platforms.
Also, I would argue that Time Machine gets little to no love because it's nearly feature complete. It's dead simple to use, does what it says on the tin, and stays out of the way to the point I forget about it most of the time. Is there anything in particular that you feel that Time Machine is missing?
> Even buying an Apple device isn't really buying a device anymore. You're really buying a transferable lease for 6-7 years on a device that has a hard stop to go to landfill after that time due to software obsolescence by way of unpatched vulnerabilities.
Again, is there a platform other than Linux that isn't similar? Also, with the progress that the Asahi Linux project is making it should be very feasible to slap Linux on an M1 Mac as soon as it goes out of support.
> I don't actually dislike Chromebooks at all, but this is saddening when you've bought a computer to use it as a computer and any sense of ownership or agency is quietly clawed away.
I keep seeing vague hand wavy claims like this on HN, but I feel that Windows, Chromebooks, and Macs are still very open to tinkering.
I almost completely agree with this, but do like the scheduling features of the free third-party "TimeMachineEditor" tool, which lets you control the backup intervals, windows, and set an exclusion window. Otherwise, TM has been pretty flawless for me.
Time Machine allows verification of backups when writing to a network share. When you write to an internal or external drive, you can’t verify your backup.
Any corruption to your backup over time can’t be detected so you can’t really trust that the backup is going to work when you need it.
On one hand, sure, there’s no way to verify historical file changes as the old versions are no longer on the current disk, but I should at least be able to verify that the current snapshot matches my current file system.
This tends to vary by generation (my laptop is just new enough for official Windows 11 support) but I think in any case is quite impressive. And of course after 2028 or whatever I can throw Linux on it and use it for another few years.
Windows. If you buy a Windows computer it will retain software support for many, many years - and support for new versions is never arbitrarily withdrawn based on device age.
The only restriction I know of in the Windows 11 migration was that it would insist on TPM2 support (and for very good reasons).
Macs do have Asahi Linux in the pipeline, but the arbitrary withdrawal of support on the basis of not having bought an entirely new computer from the same vendor in X number of years is really anti-consumer, and I’m surprised it’s not illegal.
Even in the Windows world, if a new major version comes out you could pay to upgrade (even though I don’t believe end users have had to do that for several major releases now).
The 5s from 2013 had a patch in January.
Time machine works without questions, and handles restores with perfection for users who don't know what a file system may or may not be. What features do you feel is missing?
Not every piece of software needs constant updates, sometimes they are feature complete.
I'm still using my 2012 MBPs for various purposes, such as playing videos and music for the whole family or music creation. Yes, I can't put newer versions of software on it, but I'm quite happy with what I bought. I just replace the battery every couple of years (because in these old models - I can!).
Can anyone recommend a good set up with iCloud Photos and some sort of hardware to view our photos on an always on display? We do not wish to manually copy our photos to be clear.
There are a few different ways you could display your photos. One way would be to set the lock screen wallpaper to shuffle photos. The benefit of this approach is it leaves your iPad in a pretty normal state, easy to unlock and use at any time. However, your photo frame is then limited to the customizations you can make to the lock screen, which is still pretty good for your use case and has gotten better recently.
Another option would be to set up a slideshow in the Photos app or similar and then use Guided Access to keep the screen locked to that app or slideshow. The benefit of this approach is that you can display anything with tons of customization. However, there’s a bit of extra complexity in setting it up, unlocking the device to use it if you need to, and setting it up again afterward.
My advice is to try the lock screen wallpaper approach first and then switch to Guided Access if you don’t like it.
The last piece is making sure you have all the right photos from the whole family. For that, use an iCloud Shared Photo Library.
Badly managed.
Probably not, since the very small number of people who used it were warned many times, and My Photo Stream was always a temporary destination (photos went away after 30 days).
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201317
It's a service that existed three years before iCloud Photo syncing, being released in 2011 with iCloud in 2014. It's safe to say almost everyone uses iCloud.
It appears that it let you "stream" your photos to other devices without having to plug them in, but photos were only saved for 30 days if you didn't save them to local storage from the stream. So it wasn't really a storage product as much as a weird, convenient? way to move photos from an iPad to a Mac, for example.
The photos would be stored in the cloud for up to 30 days to allow each of your subscribed devices to download them within locally within that timeframe, then would be deleted.
If the fiercest complaint you can muster is that Apple is shutting down a service that was, by today's standards, poorly designed and risky to use (photos only existed for 30 days if you didn't save them) and that has been superseded by a much better product (iCloud) for more than 9 years, well, I guess you must have more time on your hands to be outraged about product decisions than I do.
They killed the audio jack. That's pretty heinous.
And they removed the sim slot.
And the finger print reader.
And they actively try to kill 3rd party repair.
Yeah, this still sucks. It'll probably never stop being worse than having the jack.
> And they removed the sim slot.
... this has been really nice? The new virtual-sim thing has been strictly an improvement, for me. But there may be some use-cases I don't need that it's been worse for, IDK.
> And the finger print reader.
Poor success rate for me in the best of times, and I had to re-train it every few months or shifting temp & humidity would drop the unlock success rate to like 10%. Face unlock has been a huge improvement for me, and keeps getting better, a couple years of Covid mask-related trouble aside (but, YMMV).
Annoying, but easily fixed with an adapter or bluetooth headphones.
> And they removed the sim slot.
They're just ahead of the curve on this one. The entire industry is moving to eSims for a number of reasons. This wasn't just Apple. In fact, Samsung was the first major company to release a product that used it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESIM
> And the finger print reader.
Finger print readers are available on iPhone SEs, iPads (except Pro models), MacBooks, and even the latest version of their desktop keyboards. Every other device either uses Face ID or is something that just doesn't make sense to have biometric unlocking as a feature in the first place.
> And they actively try to kill 3rd party repair.
Apple devices are not easy to repair, but they do have this:
https://support.apple.com/self-service-repair
Which is better than what many manufacturers have.
On Macbook touchpads, all it did was make my drag-n-drop operations fail ~70% of the time. I never did figure out a legitimate use for it on that platform, but then, I had to disable it as soon as I figured out that was what was messing me up. I don't need drag-n-drop to become a dexterity game.
And I don't have any fine motor control deficiencies or anything. It was all just too damn fiddly to be worth using.
Similar with the touchbar. Turns out my fingers just barely brush the F keys when I hit a couple of the number keys. No problem with physical F-keys, as there's almost no pressure applied, but the touchbar? Had to all but completely disable the damn thing to stop triggering it by accident. Not gonna change my typing muscle-memory for the sake of a fad interface that's not even available on most of the keyboards I touch in a day.
Apple's not above making mis-steps. They do it pretty often, in fact.
Is that one fair? Running Windows, fully emulated, with the limited memory that M1 had, probably wouldn't be the best experience.
Bootcamp, it's not clear that they really had a choice. AFAIK you can't buy Windows for ARM separately at all (it's OEM only) and in any case it has super-limited hardware support.
I am disappointed that they never replaced the Airport Extreme; it was one of their most "Just Works" products in its day, particularly in an era when consumer wifi routers very much didn't, and I'd have liked to see an Eero-type product from them (Eero is, itself, a fairly "just works" sort of product, mind you).
Like you, I have also never heard of this service and I am all in on the Apple ecosystem. Meanwhile, I have recognized every service Google has shut down.
I doubt enough people were still using this that it'll make much difference in iCloud profits even if all of them who weren't already paying for iCloud, start.