4 ms·

Well, it shouldn't come as a surprise, that's Apple's policy towards their products.

josefresco 11y ago
I had the same reaction. I've owned older Macs and always found them- for one reason or another locked into the OS that it shipped with. My advice to family considering buying Apple hardware comes with a caveat about running older hardware/software and how Apple's approach to that, is to simply buy new hardware.
- mikeash 11y ago
  It doesn't look that way to me at all. The latest Mac OS X runs on computers as old as 2007. Apple hasn't dropped any hardware support for the last two OS revisions. I agree that it's pretty dumb that you can't locally sync music on a new iPhone without newer hardware. It connects over USB, so make it available as a USB mass storage device and be done with it! But that's separate from supporting newer OSes on older hardware, which Apple is pretty decent at.
  - saidajigumi 11y ago
    It would need to be a virtual filesystem presented as a USB mass storage device, though. I've thought about this for years, but don't know whether anyone's actually done it yet. Early iPods, etc. were definitely not powerful enough to handle this, but this should be cake for even modest smartphone hardware. Basically the VFS would present an interface to the music library, protect the library against mid-sync disconnects, etc. Likewise, the "host" computer wouldn't be able to screw up the device filesystem (or even know what the read FS type is), access non-music user data, or have low-level access to device storage.
    - mook 11y ago
      It's not USB mass storage, but what you're describing sounds like MTP. It's the protocol used in a bunch of old (first-iPhone-era) media players, and I think the default for Android 5+ or so. Used to write software to interact with it on the computer side with the Microsoft Windows Media Player SDKs. It did have the whole VFS and send the data over then commit thing.
- xenadu02 11y ago
  Apple drops old hardware when they have a good reason to do so. They decided 64-bit x86 was the future so they relatively quickly dropped PowerPC and 32-bit x86. Since then, they haven't been dropping old Macs at all. Their approach to hardware support on iOS has been similar: dropping devices with too little RAM or really wimpy CPUs/GPUs but otherwise extending it as far back as possible (some say too far back given the performance on these older devices).

I had the same reaction. I've owned older Macs and always found them- for one reason or another locked into the OS that it shipped with. My advice to family considering buying Apple hardware comes with a caveat about running older hardware/software and how Apple's approach to that, is to simply buy new hardware.

mikeash 11y ago
It doesn't look that way to me at all. The latest Mac OS X runs on computers as old as 2007. Apple hasn't dropped any hardware support for the last two OS revisions. I agree that it's pretty dumb that you can't locally sync music on a new iPhone without newer hardware. It connects over USB, so make it available as a USB mass storage device and be done with it! But that's separate from supporting newer OSes on older hardware, which Apple is pretty decent at.
- saidajigumi 11y ago
  It would need to be a virtual filesystem presented as a USB mass storage device, though. I've thought about this for years, but don't know whether anyone's actually done it yet. Early iPods, etc. were definitely not powerful enough to handle this, but this should be cake for even modest smartphone hardware. Basically the VFS would present an interface to the music library, protect the library against mid-sync disconnects, etc. Likewise, the "host" computer wouldn't be able to screw up the device filesystem (or even know what the read FS type is), access non-music user data, or have low-level access to device storage.
  - mook 11y ago
    It's not USB mass storage, but what you're describing sounds like MTP. It's the protocol used in a bunch of old (first-iPhone-era) media players, and I think the default for Android 5+ or so. Used to write software to interact with it on the computer side with the Microsoft Windows Media Player SDKs. It did have the whole VFS and send the data over then commit thing.
xenadu02 11y ago
Apple drops old hardware when they have a good reason to do so. They decided 64-bit x86 was the future so they relatively quickly dropped PowerPC and 32-bit x86. Since then, they haven't been dropping old Macs at all. Their approach to hardware support on iOS has been similar: dropping devices with too little RAM or really wimpy CPUs/GPUs but otherwise extending it as far back as possible (some say too far back given the performance on these older devices).