Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hard_Space | Hacker News Reader

This also counts for desktop Macs. Twice in the last 20 years I have had to explain to my elderly Dad that even though his expensive Mac could last another thirty years, it's now a paperweight, or something to be 'repurposed'.

I have wondered sometimes if hardware manufacturers actively seek out significant road-mapped hardware changes (such as Intel>ARM, etc., in case of Apple) in order to keep sales rolling in and stop folks 'sitting on' their well-functioning tech.

View on HN

You have to be quite cynical if you see Apple's transition to ARM only as a ploy to get people to replace their Intel based machines. I am sure it is a nice bonus, but performance and efficiency just went through the roof.

With yearly iPhone releases it is harder to justify upgrades. Like for author - upgrading from working phone to newer model while not gaining anything significant is stupid.

If the computer here is 20 years old, then we are talking about PowerPC based Mac. So two transitions over this devices lifetime: PowerPC -> Intel -> ARM.

Apple had good reasons for both transitions. In the scheme of 'forced upgrades' these are about as good as you're going to get. Also, if the OPs dad is using the computer for so little that it would last another 30 years, they certainly have no need to upgrade computers. No reason one can't keep using an intel iMac to browse the web

Yeah, it was really strange when Apple migrated to the niche x86 architecture. Definitely a money grab.

>With yearly iPhone releases it is harder to justify upgrades.

It might be helpful to think of them like cars: New models every year, but customers only "upgrade" every 10 to 20 years.

I don’t think it really matters if some people upgrade more frequently as long as the old devices enter the secondary market.

What we don’t want is functional devices rotting in a drawer or landfill.

The blog post reminded me of my last laptop upgrade (Macbook Air) as well. I was perfectly happy with the old laptop, nothing wrong with the hardware for me, but software releases started depending on new OSes and then I couldn't install those any longer. No "graceful degradation", and as far as I could tell the limitation was just the size of the storage drive for the OS in particular — not the nature of the chip itself or drivers or anything like that.

I don't necessarily attribute anything nefarious to anything, but collectively the whole thing seems like madness to me. What's ironic is I bet if I put linux on that machine, it (a) would be totally feasible to install recent versions, and (b) all the latest versions of the software I needed would be there for those versions. It seems like there needs to be some principled way of maintaining installs on older hardware... or I guess I just have to weigh this issue more heavily in my decision making about OSes in the future.

Why can't your dad keep using his existing computer? Sure, if you make your living on the computer the new laptops are great. But if he's just checking email, photos, etc - I don't know why his computer needs to become a paperweight

At some point you no longer get security upgrades. Or new web browser versions aren't available and you're unable to access certain sites. In some cases there are workarounds like installing an open source OS but that's too much hassle for most consumers.

Specifically because in each case, no updateable web browser was available any longer. To have your main machine increasingly unable to render web pages, and to suffer growing security vulnerabilities, pretty much bricks the machine for any purpose other than a scanning workstation, etc.

Fair :) I was overlooking that this latest computer could be an older intel machine that didn't receive the latest OS, thus won't still still have years of security only updates.

As someone who just upgraded from an intel to M4, I feel this. But I do wish I had known about OpenCore [0]. Ironically, I learned about it while on a bit of YouTube binge of Mac videos in preparation for my new one arriving. As much as the ecosystem has moved on from Intel, I think I'll be able to keep using my old MBP for a while longer if I can keep it on the latest version of MacOS.

[0] https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

Yup my dad bought an iMac back in 2014. It was that one model that didn't support targeted display mode. It broke about a month back (looks like drive failure) but had been having tons of issues before this due to newer software dropping support.

He should be able to just buy a cheap mac mini second hand and plug it into that gorgious 5k imac display, but nope. Cant do that.

Apple just like every other company could not give less of a crap about ewaste. There is absolutely zero reason why they couldn't relax the limits on older hardware to allow it to be repurposed.

What's now going to happen in my dads case is he'll buy a cheap 4k monitor, probably a second hand mac mini and send the iMac to a charity for recycling.

The whole Intel -> ARM thing though was absolutely about performance and Intel's utterly awful processors holding them back. The forced upgrades were just a bonus for Apple.

There is a third party upgrade that will turn those retina iMacs into a monitor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com