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Say what you will about legacy support or planned obsolescence, but Apple has been constantly pushing the computing envelope exactly because they don't have to

Say what you will about legacy support or planned obsolescence, but Apple has been constantly pushing the computing envelope exactly because they don't have to be Microsoft and get held back by older technology.

averagewall 10y ago
Yes, only Apple could get away with this and it's great that they're willing to sacrifice a few short term $ for the long term benefit. Sure, a lot of software will become useless. Same as happened with all the Mac architecture changes over the past couple of decades. Apple developers should should expect to stay on the ball and users should expect not to start depending on old unsupported software. If you prefer longer backward compatibility, and no rush to keep updating everything, use Windows, but pay the price in ugliness. I'll be glad when all 32 bit platforms are out of use. There's so much duplicated code around and time wasted debugging 32/64 bit mixups.
- simonh 10y ago
  > Yes, only Apple could get away with this Android phone vendors drop support for their devices and software like a stone all the time, but it's just considered business as usual. Apple twitches in a vaguely unexpected way and the internet burns down in paranoid outrage. Personally, I'm going to wait until we actually find out what this means.
  - saurik 10y ago
    So, some people are talking about iOS itself possibly dropping support for 32-bit hardware, while others (including myself) are talking about issues with existing hardware not even being able to run things that will soon no longer be downloadable, and are taking this as an opportunity to lament over the lack of historical preservation of software. FWIW, you might mean the former, but I'm going to address the latter. In one of the few really legitimately "open" things Google does with Android, they provide emulators for their devices and downloadable historic stock firmwares; and because they don't have control over their hardware, they don't have the ability to implement "actually good" DRM on their application archive files. Apple has set up an environment where when they sunset something, it will actually fade from existence: that is not the case with Android.

averagewall 10y ago

Yes, only Apple could get away with this and it's great that they're willing to sacrifice a few short term $ for the long term benefit. Sure, a lot of software will become useless. Same as happened with all the Mac architecture changes over the past couple of decades. Apple developers should should expect to stay on the ball and users should expect not to start depending on old unsupported software. If you prefer longer backward compatibility, and no rush to keep updating everything, use Windows, but pay the price in ugliness. I'll be glad when all 32 bit platforms are out of use. There's so much duplicated code around and time wasted debugging 32/64 bit mixups.

simonh 10y ago
> Yes, only Apple could get away with this Android phone vendors drop support for their devices and software like a stone all the time, but it's just considered business as usual. Apple twitches in a vaguely unexpected way and the internet burns down in paranoid outrage. Personally, I'm going to wait until we actually find out what this means.
- saurik 10y ago
  So, some people are talking about iOS itself possibly dropping support for 32-bit hardware, while others (including myself) are talking about issues with existing hardware not even being able to run things that will soon no longer be downloadable, and are taking this as an opportunity to lament over the lack of historical preservation of software. FWIW, you might mean the former, but I'm going to address the latter. In one of the few really legitimately "open" things Google does with Android, they provide emulators for their devices and downloadable historic stock firmwares; and because they don't have control over their hardware, they don't have the ability to implement "actually good" DRM on their application archive files. Apple has set up an environment where when they sunset something, it will actually fade from existence: that is not the case with Android.