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OS fragmentation? Call MG! I kid, but it's interesting to see a few warts in the Apple ecosystem. Nobody can argue that they don't make awesome products, but

OS fragmentation? Call MG! I kid, but it's interesting to see a few warts in the Apple ecosystem. Nobody can argue that they don't make awesome products, but as they slip into the "mainstream" we're going to see that it's more and more difficult to maintain a flawless complexion. First, they remove the "can't get a virus!" ad, now this, within weeks. Being unable to upgrade your OS is no minor quibble. "It just works" indeed.

sirn 14y ago
They've been doing this since Mac OS X 10.3 or so. It's nothing new.
- tatsuke95 14y ago
  I didn't realize that. Then why is this news? And why is it news when a phone company decides it's not worth the trouble to build out ICS for a 2 year old phone? Honest questions. As people in this thread with more knowledge than myself have stated, there's a tradeoff in introducing new technology and maintaining legacy hardware support. OS fragmentation seems natural. And the better our tech gets (longer life of devices), the worse the problem will get. Considering how fast phone technology works, why is/was Android fragmentation such an issue?
  - minikites 14y ago
    Because (as far as I know), lots of currently shipping phones ship with old versions of Android. Everything that Apple currently ships will be upgradeable to iOS 6 or Mountain Lion.
  - sirn 14y ago
    I don't think the problem people are complaining about Android fragmentation is a phone company decides it's not worth the trouble to build out ICS for a 2 year old phone but rather there's still brand new Android 2.x on sale today with no upgrade path. Optimus L3 was released earlier this year, ships with 2.3 with no foreseeable upgrade path (thanks to its low price). The software is outdated the moment it was released. I'm looking for Android phone today and still undecided of what to get (inclined to get HTC One X) because I'm unsure whether it will get a 4.1 update or not.
    - vshade 14y ago
      HTC has a good track record of updating their phones, at one time they were the manufacturer that was best at updating their androids.
      - atopuzov 14y ago
        For me it was just the opposite I got an HTC phone with 1.6 (when it was already obsolete) and newer got an upgrade (except Cyanogen which doesn't count as HTC)
        vshade 14y ago
        I was saying compared to the others manufacturers, specially motorola.
    - tatsuke95 14y ago
      >"but rather there's still brand new Android 2.x on sale today with no upgrade path." But the fact that there is still an Android with 2.2 available, brand new is what gives Android it's market advantage: cheap phones. For all people who aren't really techies, Android 2.2 does everything you need, and far more than my original Motorola RAZR. That's bad for Android?
  - wtallis 14y ago
    It's one thing to drop support for computers that are several years past the end of their extended warranties, based on mostly sound technical reasoning, and another thing entirely to stop issuing updates for phones that are still under contract. And I say this as someone who waited for the update to 64-bit CPUs and then got screwed with 32-bit only firmware. If I had been paying a subscription for my Mac or if the OS updates were as expensive as Windows used to be, I would very upset at Apple's decision to never overhaul the firmware on my Mac, but as it is I'm just disappointed in Apple and Intel for not having a 64-bit EFI ready when the Core 2 processors shipped.
saturdaysaint 14y ago
Consistently, strategically EOL-ing/deprecating technologies, even through some painful transitions, is no small part of why Apple are in a good position today. There's no way they could've pushed the iPhone out the door in 2007 if they were obsessively keeping all of their Mac software compatible across Intel/PPC or providing support to OS9 users (not that those are completely meritless). The de-emphasis of backward compatibility has been a tactical advantage against Microsoft.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  I read this all the time but I don't buy it. Hiring some maintenance programmers to take care of 10.6 or 10.7 security for X more years (and announcing that EOL date!) sounds pretty harmless. How would that hold Apple back at all? They have mountains of cash in the bank and those programmers wouldn't get into the way of 10.8 or 10.9 at all.
  - bestes 14y ago
    That is the brute-force approach Microsoft uses. Corporations love it. I find the problem is that the "matrix" of possibilities you have to keep in mind as a programmer keeps getting bigger and bigger. You end up with the Adobe Flash effect (least common denominator) within your own OS or program or whatever. I would call that a very high price indeed.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    If you can hire qualified systems programmers, you can put them to much more productive use than maintaining Mac OS 10.6 for another decade.
  - saturdaysaint 14y ago
    Security patches, while not trivial or cheap, are vastly simpler than either the backward compatibility problems I described or the issue at hand with incompatible video drivers. You can't just add programmers to mate cutting edge OS kernel features (ie leveraging recent videocards) with old hardware. None of us can speak authoritatively on the case in point, but it seems painfully optimistic to think you can pull this off without introducing a lot of complexity. And then, what happens if the 10.8 team tweaks the kernel during a point update? Yep, better double or triple the testing team. "Oh, it looks like it'll take some work to get 10.8 working with all of our old AMD chipsets - either we delay release until fall (after Windows 8, unfortunately) or we put some of our "A" engineers on it." Complexity is the keyword. Complexity and mediocrity go hand in hand. Backward compatibility is a noble goal in many ways, but every generation back of software/hardware you try to maintain exponentially increases the complexity you deal with instead of putting a better new product in user's hands.

sirn 14y ago

They've been doing this since Mac OS X 10.3 or so. It's nothing new.

tatsuke95 14y ago
I didn't realize that. Then why is this news? And why is it news when a phone company decides it's not worth the trouble to build out ICS for a 2 year old phone? Honest questions. As people in this thread with more knowledge than myself have stated, there's a tradeoff in introducing new technology and maintaining legacy hardware support. OS fragmentation seems natural. And the better our tech gets (longer life of devices), the worse the problem will get. Considering how fast phone technology works, why is/was Android fragmentation such an issue?
- minikites 14y ago
  Because (as far as I know), lots of currently shipping phones ship with old versions of Android. Everything that Apple currently ships will be upgradeable to iOS 6 or Mountain Lion.
- sirn 14y ago
  I don't think the problem people are complaining about Android fragmentation is a phone company decides it's not worth the trouble to build out ICS for a 2 year old phone but rather there's still brand new Android 2.x on sale today with no upgrade path. Optimus L3 was released earlier this year, ships with 2.3 with no foreseeable upgrade path (thanks to its low price). The software is outdated the moment it was released. I'm looking for Android phone today and still undecided of what to get (inclined to get HTC One X) because I'm unsure whether it will get a 4.1 update or not.
  - vshade 14y ago
    HTC has a good track record of updating their phones, at one time they were the manufacturer that was best at updating their androids.
    - atopuzov 14y ago
      For me it was just the opposite I got an HTC phone with 1.6 (when it was already obsolete) and newer got an upgrade (except Cyanogen which doesn't count as HTC)
      - vshade 14y ago
        I was saying compared to the others manufacturers, specially motorola.
  - tatsuke95 14y ago
    >"but rather there's still brand new Android 2.x on sale today with no upgrade path." But the fact that there is still an Android with 2.2 available, brand new is what gives Android it's market advantage: cheap phones. For all people who aren't really techies, Android 2.2 does everything you need, and far more than my original Motorola RAZR. That's bad for Android?
- wtallis 14y ago
  It's one thing to drop support for computers that are several years past the end of their extended warranties, based on mostly sound technical reasoning, and another thing entirely to stop issuing updates for phones that are still under contract. And I say this as someone who waited for the update to 64-bit CPUs and then got screwed with 32-bit only firmware. If I had been paying a subscription for my Mac or if the OS updates were as expensive as Windows used to be, I would very upset at Apple's decision to never overhaul the firmware on my Mac, but as it is I'm just disappointed in Apple and Intel for not having a 64-bit EFI ready when the Core 2 processors shipped.

saturdaysaint 14y ago

Consistently, strategically EOL-ing/deprecating technologies, even through some painful transitions, is no small part of why Apple are in a good position today. There's no way they could've pushed the iPhone out the door in 2007 if they were obsessively keeping all of their Mac software compatible across Intel/PPC or providing support to OS9 users (not that those are completely meritless). The de-emphasis of backward compatibility has been a tactical advantage against Microsoft.

gurkendoktor 14y ago
I read this all the time but I don't buy it. Hiring some maintenance programmers to take care of 10.6 or 10.7 security for X more years (and announcing that EOL date!) sounds pretty harmless. How would that hold Apple back at all? They have mountains of cash in the bank and those programmers wouldn't get into the way of 10.8 or 10.9 at all.
- bestes 14y ago
  That is the brute-force approach Microsoft uses. Corporations love it. I find the problem is that the "matrix" of possibilities you have to keep in mind as a programmer keeps getting bigger and bigger. You end up with the Adobe Flash effect (least common denominator) within your own OS or program or whatever. I would call that a very high price indeed.
- philwelch 14y ago
  If you can hire qualified systems programmers, you can put them to much more productive use than maintaining Mac OS 10.6 for another decade.
- saturdaysaint 14y ago
  Security patches, while not trivial or cheap, are vastly simpler than either the backward compatibility problems I described or the issue at hand with incompatible video drivers. You can't just add programmers to mate cutting edge OS kernel features (ie leveraging recent videocards) with old hardware. None of us can speak authoritatively on the case in point, but it seems painfully optimistic to think you can pull this off without introducing a lot of complexity. And then, what happens if the 10.8 team tweaks the kernel during a point update? Yep, better double or triple the testing team. "Oh, it looks like it'll take some work to get 10.8 working with all of our old AMD chipsets - either we delay release until fall (after Windows 8, unfortunately) or we put some of our "A" engineers on it." Complexity is the keyword. Complexity and mediocrity go hand in hand. Backward compatibility is a noble goal in many ways, but every generation back of software/hardware you try to maintain exponentially increases the complexity you deal with instead of putting a better new product in user's hands.