7 ms·

As nice as Apple's hardware is it's all undermined by who they are as a company, intentionally limiting their devices more and more while they relentlessly argu

by benoau 5mo ago

As nice as Apple's hardware is it's all undermined by who they are as a company, intentionally limiting their devices more and more while they relentlessly argue in courts and to regulators that we owe them more and more for using our devices. Rosetta 2's retirement announcement was when I realized I won't buy another Mac, I'm not interested in a computer that is preoccupied with stopping me from running software. Work can buy them for me but I won't spend my money on a platform like that anymore. Depending on how their Supreme Court argument goes in a few weeks I will stop buying an iPhone too, if they establish the precedent that any method of paying for Netflix deserves a $5/month fee then they will leverage that to extract the same fee everywhere else.

tencentshill 5mo ago
When is reasonable to stop supporting a platform that only hinders the user experience? Should they have supported PPC emulation forever? x86 is on the way out in for most consumer devices. Apple is usually a bit early to drop technologies, but still acknowledges and fixes real mistakes (USB-C-only laptops and the associated keyboards) when they impact customer experience.
- jbm 5mo ago
  > Should they have supported PPC emulation forever Yes.
  - ghostpepper 5mo ago
    Supporting everything forever is how you end up with Windows
    - idle_zealot 5mo ago
      Here I was thinking the problem with Windows was the dog-slow RAM hogs the team replaced most of the core applications with so they could serve web ads in the launcher and OS chrome. Silly me, the real problem with Windows is that it can run old apps if you still have the exe kicking around.
    - andrepd 5mo ago
      Windows has many flaws, being able to run any binary made in the past 30 years is not one of them.
    - whywhywhywhy 5mo ago
      Not really, Apple was doing something right at that point they got almost everything from classic to OSX, ppc to Intel, from 32bit to 64bit, x86 to ARM. I used it through all of that and really at no point was it feeling forced and the only one with real friction was classic mode the rest felt seamless. They must have just been doing something right with dev relations and community. Although I will say now a lot of people don’t seem to care with keeping up with far less extreme random iOS hurdles.
    - cyberax 5mo ago
      You mean, being able to run binaries from 25 years ago? Yes, please!
    - amrit3128 5mo ago
      You think the worst thing about windows is one ofnthe best things about windows?
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - MBCook 5mo ago
      They had the classic environment. They could have kept that going. Business decision, pure and simple. Value added and risk of people not moving forward was not worth the cost to them. They were also way smaller at the time than today, though the iPod had taken off. I’m fine with them eventually dropping support for things. Some things I think they do too early. Microsoft HAS to keep supporting stuff forever. That’s their bread and butter. Line of business apps. If they drop support businesses lose THE reason to stay with them. It’s far less of an issue for Apple. And people do leave because of it. But not enough. It’s also one of the reasons (of many) they’re not very popular in business.
      - duskwuff 5mo ago
        > They had the classic environment. They could have kept that going. Not for long. The Classic environment depended on the system having a PowerPC CPU - it would not have run on Intel systems. (Rosetta translation would not have been applicable.)
        MBCook 5mo ago
        I know it didn’t last long. But why do you say Rosetta wouldn’t have worked?
        simondotau 5mo ago
        The Classic environment depended on the system having a PowerPC CPU.
        duskwuff 5mo ago
        For essentially the same reason that Rosetta 2 can't be used to run Windows - they're userspace JIT translators, not system-level emulators. The Classic Environment was, for all intents and purposes, an entire virtualized PowerPC system running Mac OS 9, and allowed software running inside it to do some pretty wild things like patching system "trap" routines, writing graphics directly to the framebuffer, or even setting breakpoints in and handling exceptions from other applications.
    - jbm 5mo ago
      Windows did not even support Final Fantasy 7 between two versions due to their broken Direct X design. Let's bury that turkey; just because there are compelling blog posts doesn't mean they are a legitimate reflection of Microsoft. As a customer I expect my software to work, permanently. Don't expect me to cry for the richest companies in the world.
  - throw0101c 5mo ago
    Linux hasn't even bothered continuing supporting processors in the same family, dropping support for 386: * https://www.zdnet.com/article/good-bye-386-linux-to-drop-support-for-i386-chips-with-next-major-release/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/good-bye-386-linux-to-drop-sup... and more recently, 486: * https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-devs-start-removing-support-for-37-year-old-intel-486-cpu-head-honcho-linus-torvalds-says-zero-real-reason-to-continue-support https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-devs-start... and here we are expecting support for completely different CPU classes. :)
    - choo-t 5mo ago
      Supporting very old hardwares and supporting less than a decade old softwares are two very different things.
- pdimitar 5mo ago
  > x86 is on the way out in for most consumer devices. Define "consumer devices"? I am holding on to my AMD Ryzen machines until they literally fall dead. I have no complaints from them. Maybe some modern or even next-gen ARM CPUs will be even better on Linux but I don't think we are quite there yet. x86_64 is here to stay for a long time still. But maybe you literally meant x86 as in the 32-bit CPU arch? If so, I'd mostly agree but not quite; they could be used in low-power micro-PCs for a long time still as well.
- makeitdouble 5mo ago
  > When is reasonable to stop supporting a platform that only hinders the user experience? When people who care about it can carry on the torch. Dropping support wouldn't matter if anyone outside of Apple could keep it alive instead, or if Rosetta 2 users could stay on the last supported OS and keep their devices secured through community patches etc.
- simondotau 5mo ago
  > USB-C-only laptops I think it's hilarious that Apple managed to get criticised for being both too early AND too late with USB-C.
  - al_borland 5mo ago
    To be fair, they were criticized a lot for dropping the 30-pin connector and going to Lightning too. At the time they said they designed Lightning to last 10 years (about how long 30-pin lasted), because they knew how disruptive a port change is with all the accessories people have. It lasted from 2012-2023, 11 years. So they made good on their promise.
    - benoau 5mo ago
      "Promise" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, this whole theory is extrapolated entirely from a single remark during the iPhone 5 introduction in 2012, "this connector is a modern connector for the next decade". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4gC4Z-fx5k&t=1571s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4gC4Z-fx5k&t=1571s The only other time they referred to replacing Lightning was when Joswiak said "obviously we’ll have to comply, we have no choice.". https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/26/23423977/iphone-usb-c-eu-law-joswiak-confirms-compliance-lightning https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/26/23423977/iphone-usb-c-eu...
- Danox 5mo ago
  Apple moved ahead with thunderbolt five should they keep thunderbolt four? Moving to thunderbolt five is necessary if you want to drive more information to a 5K or 6k monitor or any other peripheral.
cloverich 5mo ago
The other day i saw a slick scifi movie and really liked the interface in one of the random background terminals. I thought id recreate a working version of it. I snapped a screenshot on my iphone where i was watching, but lo it was blacked out? Same after several attempts. Ugh fine, go to my macbook, fire up netflix in a browser there, screenshot from desktop. Nope. Still blacked out. Its not just older architecture we are losing out on.
- nozzlegear 5mo ago
  Is this just "Person discovers DRM, c. 2026" dressed up as a complaint about Apple?
  - _hyn3 5mo ago
    Only if you are solely an Apple user, because it's literally not a problem anywhere else. I've taken tons of photos of movies with my Pixels.
    - iknowstuff 5mo ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidQuestions/comments/5biobx/is_there_a_way_to_screenshot_netflix/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidQuestions/comments/5biobx/is...
    - theodric 5mo ago
      My Pixel 8a also blocks screenshots of DRM content. The analog hole remains gaping: pause the movie on your MacBook, and take a picture of the screen with your iPhone.
    - nickv 5mo ago
      You have definitely not. Go ahead, try taking a screenshot of a movie playing on Netflix on your pixel right now.
      - _hyn3 5mo ago
        I said movies. As in, the movie theater. I cancelled Netflix years ago.
cardanome 5mo ago
That is all true but even as a hardcore Linux and Thinkpad user, I have to admit it is a hard sell when no one can offer the quality of Apple. Apple is the only hardware company where you can buy a product and it is good hardware wise. Sure other companies have flagship offerings but with apple you get a really good base model. And that is where it breaks down for me. Pay 20% more for freedom? Yes, absolutely. But pay more for much worse? Yeah, not many people are going to be so idealistic. I don't know why no one else can produce a laptop with decent battery life with an near silent fan and good display and overall great production quality. Yes, it is much easier when you are as big as apple and can rely on economics of scale but that doesn't totally explain the lack of quality when it comes to the competition.
- fragmede 5mo ago
  And that device is the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 OLED. The paper specs are great, all that's required is to turn it into a fully fleged Linux laptop and get rid of ChromeOS and core boot entirely. I just got hibernate working on it last night, wifi, sleep and sound and the fingerprint sensor works. There's some more polish and tuning to be done, but this'll be the machine I move off my apple silicon laptop for. Apple hardware is only perfect when looked at through rose tinted glasses. The whole butterfly keyboard issue should be enough to indight them from being seen as perfect with hardware. There's a reason Applecare exists, and it's not just because of accidental spills.
- trouve_search 5mo ago
  I've been using an asus zenbook 14 OLED with linux. Compatibility is great. The screen blows apple out completely. It's clearly, obviously better. The fan noise and battery life are worse than Apple. The keyboard feels better to type on, the trackpad is slightly worse, but not enough to annoy me. The new Pop OS cosmic is a very fun OS concept for laptops with the autotiling workspaces as a fundamental primitive.
  - kvuj 5mo ago
    From a quick search online, the max brightness of your laptop is 400 nits SDR and 500 HDR. My M5 MacBook Pro is 1000 and 1500 nits. Screen brightness is not something I will compromise on after having a taste of greatness. I personally wouldn't mind spending 30-40% more for a Linux laptop with similar qualities + repairability. But I will not settle for something much more expensive and worst in some aspects. There are also arguments agains repairability in Framework's laptop. I did the calculations and for the Framework 16, it would be cheaper to buy a gaming Asus laptop and throw it out in a couple years to replace it versus buying a framework and upgrading it. Utter insanity.
rangestransform 5mo ago
Forcing developers off of Rosetta 2 is a pro-consumer move because it gives the ultimate incentive for developers to modernize. I don’t want to use Lightroom (replace with whatever app is part of your workflow) through x86 emulation, I want Apple to bitch slap Adobe into porting it to native. Microsoft will be forced to expend resources to support x86 emulation for all of eternity. Apple throwing their weight around in a pro-consumer way (Rosetta, ask app not to track) is why I use their devices
- no-name-here 5mo ago
  1. A ton of software won't get updated even with customers losing access to stuff they bought in the Apple app store. I've been through this multiple times with Apple where existing software is just suddenly unavailable to those who’d installed it. 2. Consumers losing the choice to use apps they bought or downloaded is not pro-consumer (if they want to continue getting OS security patches etc). As you said, it's a conscious choice by Apple to cause customers to lose access to software they'd bought etc, as Microsoft’s approach allows us to still use software from multiple decades ago. (I’d gotten a piece of paid software from the iOS + iPad app store in 2011. I lost access a few years later during another Apple change.) 3. However, I think you're right that we will see more and more companies cause customers to lose access to existing software, features, etc that customers had bought, but similarly frame it as a good thing, forcing ‘modernization’, etc.
  - al_borland 5mo ago
    If you’re worried about OS security patches, shouldn’t using software that hasn’t been updated in 6 years be of similar concern? I’m not arguing that software needs to be updated every 2 weeks, as is the trend now. However, 6 years, when there have been major architectural changes and UI changes. At some point the software should be deemed abandoned and it’s time to find something new. Even a simple update to support the M-series chips means the dev is still around and can release updates, even if there have been no other feature updates in 6 years as its finished software. The occasional sign of life on finished projects is helpful.
- shantara 5mo ago
daneel_w 5mo ago
But Rosetta was always meant to be just a temporary compatibility bridge. Surely you too would consider it kind of crazy if they were today, still, pouring time into maintaining Rosetta 1 for people wanting to run PPC software on macOS/x86. The first Arm build of macOS is now 6 years old, and when Rosetta 2 is ultimately removed from macOS in late 2027 it will have been available to us for close to 8 years. That's a pretty generous amount of time given to us to move forward.
- functionmouse 5mo ago
  The work is done. Why not just leave it in? Or FOSS it so the community maintains it, like WINE?
  - anon7000 5mo ago
    Apple wants everything to be consistent. I have mixed feelings on it, because I do greatly despise windows, partly because of how inconsistent everything is. It’s chock full of half finished “migrations”. Like, programs still installing to “Programs Files (x86)” Which doesn’t matter but adds the tiniest bit of friction.
    - selicos 5mo ago
      I think only 32bit apps install there. Ideally there is a 64bit version that continues forward. This is mostly an issue for me with enterprise/etc software I support at work. A key system I just moved to Server 2022 (on prem and Azure VMs) is 32-bit and still uses 32bit ODBC. It's a great app for our need. Just, still 32bit...
      - zamadatix 5mo ago
        The intent is only 32 bit apps get installed there, but there are a few problems in practice. Dunno why you're currently downvoted about it though. The first is needing to know whether the app was 32 bit or not is sort of the main annoyance with that itself. The second is not every app follows this rule correctly, for whatever reason. The third is there isn't a clear path for mixed apps, e.g. Steam. On Windows, Steam is still a mix of 32 bit and 64 bit components, so there isn't really a "clean place for it to go. You could have one option of putting Steam in one or the other and then mixing 32/64 bit apps in that folder & you have the other option of duplicating things, moving the initial problem an extra directory level deeper. 3b is that Steam installs the games under its folder, and the games you can install can be 32 bit, 64 bit, or a mix - duplicating the problem yet again. Until the start of this year, Steam still supported 32 bit Windows and, therefore, you could also have 16 bit games be installed. There were reasons to do the split in the early 2000s but holding on to each decision like this for decades after seems to cause more pain than it ends up avoiding.
sgjohnson 5mo ago
> Rosetta 2's retirement announcement was when I realized I won't buy another Mac, I'm not interested in a computer that is preoccupied with stopping me from running software. This is the 3rd time this has happened in roughly 2 decades by the way. ppc/ppc64 -> x86_64 x86_64 -> x64 only x64 -> arm64 I much prefer Apple just forcing the developers to update their apps. Perhaps it’s just me though.
- Danox 5mo ago
  Continue to support obsolete hardware just cause doesn’t make any sense. Apple had to move on just like they had to move away from Motorola, IBM and Intel. Apple also had to move away from AMD and Nvidia, Broadcom, and probably Qualcomm, and with the current memory crisis, Apple may have to take memory in house too. Many of the moves were done not because they wanted to, but because they had to.
cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
Right, I mean, like Jeff's content but it sort of felt like he was metaphorically "punching down" in this video. Of course Apple can make a relatively cheap mass produced device that can outcompete on price / spec -- they've been making iPads for almost two decades now. They just threw a keyboard on one and changed the bootloader to boot OSX. Good for them. 20 years of R&D paid off for one of the largest and most valued and profitable companies in the world. If I want a relatively cheap machine I can actually run Linux (or for other people, Windows) on, or can upgrade or repair... Apple is not in the running.

by benoau 5mo ago

tencentshill 5mo ago

When is reasonable to stop supporting a platform that only hinders the user experience? Should they have supported PPC emulation forever? x86 is on the way out in for most consumer devices. Apple is usually a bit early to drop technologies, but still acknowledges and fixes real mistakes (USB-C-only laptops and the associated keyboards) when they impact customer experience.

jbm 5mo ago
> Should they have supported PPC emulation forever Yes.
- ghostpepper 5mo ago
  Supporting everything forever is how you end up with Windows
  - idle_zealot 5mo ago
    Here I was thinking the problem with Windows was the dog-slow RAM hogs the team replaced most of the core applications with so they could serve web ads in the launcher and OS chrome. Silly me, the real problem with Windows is that it can run old apps if you still have the exe kicking around.
  - andrepd 5mo ago
    Windows has many flaws, being able to run any binary made in the past 30 years is not one of them.
  - whywhywhywhy 5mo ago
    Not really, Apple was doing something right at that point they got almost everything from classic to OSX, ppc to Intel, from 32bit to 64bit, x86 to ARM. I used it through all of that and really at no point was it feeling forced and the only one with real friction was classic mode the rest felt seamless. They must have just been doing something right with dev relations and community. Although I will say now a lot of people don’t seem to care with keeping up with far less extreme random iOS hurdles.
  - cyberax 5mo ago
    You mean, being able to run binaries from 25 years ago? Yes, please!
  - amrit3128 5mo ago
    You think the worst thing about windows is one ofnthe best things about windows?
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - MBCook 5mo ago
    They had the classic environment. They could have kept that going. Business decision, pure and simple. Value added and risk of people not moving forward was not worth the cost to them. They were also way smaller at the time than today, though the iPod had taken off. I’m fine with them eventually dropping support for things. Some things I think they do too early. Microsoft HAS to keep supporting stuff forever. That’s their bread and butter. Line of business apps. If they drop support businesses lose THE reason to stay with them. It’s far less of an issue for Apple. And people do leave because of it. But not enough. It’s also one of the reasons (of many) they’re not very popular in business.
    - duskwuff 5mo ago
      > They had the classic environment. They could have kept that going. Not for long. The Classic environment depended on the system having a PowerPC CPU - it would not have run on Intel systems. (Rosetta translation would not have been applicable.)
      - MBCook 5mo ago
        I know it didn’t last long. But why do you say Rosetta wouldn’t have worked?
        simondotau 5mo ago
        The Classic environment depended on the system having a PowerPC CPU.
        duskwuff 5mo ago
        For essentially the same reason that Rosetta 2 can't be used to run Windows - they're userspace JIT translators, not system-level emulators. The Classic Environment was, for all intents and purposes, an entire virtualized PowerPC system running Mac OS 9, and allowed software running inside it to do some pretty wild things like patching system "trap" routines, writing graphics directly to the framebuffer, or even setting breakpoints in and handling exceptions from other applications.
  - jbm 5mo ago
    Windows did not even support Final Fantasy 7 between two versions due to their broken Direct X design. Let's bury that turkey; just because there are compelling blog posts doesn't mean they are a legitimate reflection of Microsoft. As a customer I expect my software to work, permanently. Don't expect me to cry for the richest companies in the world.
- throw0101c 5mo ago
  Linux hasn't even bothered continuing supporting processors in the same family, dropping support for 386: * https://www.zdnet.com/article/good-bye-386-linux-to-drop-support-for-i386-chips-with-next-major-release/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/good-bye-386-linux-to-drop-sup... and more recently, 486: * https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-devs-start-removing-support-for-37-year-old-intel-486-cpu-head-honcho-linus-torvalds-says-zero-real-reason-to-continue-support https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-devs-start... and here we are expecting support for completely different CPU classes. :)
  - choo-t 5mo ago
    Supporting very old hardwares and supporting less than a decade old softwares are two very different things.
pdimitar 5mo ago
> x86 is on the way out in for most consumer devices. Define "consumer devices"? I am holding on to my AMD Ryzen machines until they literally fall dead. I have no complaints from them. Maybe some modern or even next-gen ARM CPUs will be even better on Linux but I don't think we are quite there yet. x86_64 is here to stay for a long time still. But maybe you literally meant x86 as in the 32-bit CPU arch? If so, I'd mostly agree but not quite; they could be used in low-power micro-PCs for a long time still as well.
makeitdouble 5mo ago
> When is reasonable to stop supporting a platform that only hinders the user experience? When people who care about it can carry on the torch. Dropping support wouldn't matter if anyone outside of Apple could keep it alive instead, or if Rosetta 2 users could stay on the last supported OS and keep their devices secured through community patches etc.
simondotau 5mo ago
> USB-C-only laptops I think it's hilarious that Apple managed to get criticised for being both too early AND too late with USB-C.
- al_borland 5mo ago
  To be fair, they were criticized a lot for dropping the 30-pin connector and going to Lightning too. At the time they said they designed Lightning to last 10 years (about how long 30-pin lasted), because they knew how disruptive a port change is with all the accessories people have. It lasted from 2012-2023, 11 years. So they made good on their promise.
  - benoau 5mo ago
    "Promise" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, this whole theory is extrapolated entirely from a single remark during the iPhone 5 introduction in 2012, "this connector is a modern connector for the next decade". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4gC4Z-fx5k&t=1571s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4gC4Z-fx5k&t=1571s The only other time they referred to replacing Lightning was when Joswiak said "obviously we’ll have to comply, we have no choice.". https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/26/23423977/iphone-usb-c-eu-law-joswiak-confirms-compliance-lightning https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/26/23423977/iphone-usb-c-eu...
Danox 5mo ago
Apple moved ahead with thunderbolt five should they keep thunderbolt four? Moving to thunderbolt five is necessary if you want to drive more information to a 5K or 6k monitor or any other peripheral.

cloverich 5mo ago

The other day i saw a slick scifi movie and really liked the interface in one of the random background terminals. I thought id recreate a working version of it. I snapped a screenshot on my iphone where i was watching, but lo it was blacked out? Same after several attempts. Ugh fine, go to my macbook, fire up netflix in a browser there, screenshot from desktop. Nope. Still blacked out. Its not just older architecture we are losing out on.

nozzlegear 5mo ago
Is this just "Person discovers DRM, c. 2026" dressed up as a complaint about Apple?
- _hyn3 5mo ago
  Only if you are solely an Apple user, because it's literally not a problem anywhere else. I've taken tons of photos of movies with my Pixels.
  - iknowstuff 5mo ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidQuestions/comments/5biobx/is_there_a_way_to_screenshot_netflix/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidQuestions/comments/5biobx/is...
  - theodric 5mo ago
    My Pixel 8a also blocks screenshots of DRM content. The analog hole remains gaping: pause the movie on your MacBook, and take a picture of the screen with your iPhone.
  - nickv 5mo ago
    You have definitely not. Go ahead, try taking a screenshot of a movie playing on Netflix on your pixel right now.
    - _hyn3 5mo ago
      I said movies. As in, the movie theater. I cancelled Netflix years ago.

cardanome 5mo ago

That is all true but even as a hardcore Linux and Thinkpad user, I have to admit it is a hard sell when no one can offer the quality of Apple. Apple is the only hardware company where you can buy a product and it is good hardware wise. Sure other companies have flagship offerings but with apple you get a really good base model. And that is where it breaks down for me. Pay 20% more for freedom? Yes, absolutely. But pay more for much worse? Yeah, not many people are going to be so idealistic. I don't know why no one else can produce a laptop with decent battery life with an near silent fan and good display and overall great production quality. Yes, it is much easier when you are as big as apple and can rely on economics of scale but that doesn't totally explain the lack of quality when it comes to the competition.

fragmede 5mo ago
And that device is the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 OLED. The paper specs are great, all that's required is to turn it into a fully fleged Linux laptop and get rid of ChromeOS and core boot entirely. I just got hibernate working on it last night, wifi, sleep and sound and the fingerprint sensor works. There's some more polish and tuning to be done, but this'll be the machine I move off my apple silicon laptop for. Apple hardware is only perfect when looked at through rose tinted glasses. The whole butterfly keyboard issue should be enough to indight them from being seen as perfect with hardware. There's a reason Applecare exists, and it's not just because of accidental spills.
trouve_search 5mo ago
I've been using an asus zenbook 14 OLED with linux. Compatibility is great. The screen blows apple out completely. It's clearly, obviously better. The fan noise and battery life are worse than Apple. The keyboard feels better to type on, the trackpad is slightly worse, but not enough to annoy me. The new Pop OS cosmic is a very fun OS concept for laptops with the autotiling workspaces as a fundamental primitive.
- kvuj 5mo ago
  From a quick search online, the max brightness of your laptop is 400 nits SDR and 500 HDR. My M5 MacBook Pro is 1000 and 1500 nits. Screen brightness is not something I will compromise on after having a taste of greatness. I personally wouldn't mind spending 30-40% more for a Linux laptop with similar qualities + repairability. But I will not settle for something much more expensive and worst in some aspects. There are also arguments agains repairability in Framework's laptop. I did the calculations and for the Framework 16, it would be cheaper to buy a gaming Asus laptop and throw it out in a couple years to replace it versus buying a framework and upgrading it. Utter insanity.

rangestransform 5mo ago

Forcing developers off of Rosetta 2 is a pro-consumer move because it gives the ultimate incentive for developers to modernize. I don’t want to use Lightroom (replace with whatever app is part of your workflow) through x86 emulation, I want Apple to bitch slap Adobe into porting it to native. Microsoft will be forced to expend resources to support x86 emulation for all of eternity. Apple throwing their weight around in a pro-consumer way (Rosetta, ask app not to track) is why I use their devices

no-name-here 5mo ago
1. A ton of software won't get updated even with customers losing access to stuff they bought in the Apple app store. I've been through this multiple times with Apple where existing software is just suddenly unavailable to those who’d installed it. 2. Consumers losing the choice to use apps they bought or downloaded is not pro-consumer (if they want to continue getting OS security patches etc). As you said, it's a conscious choice by Apple to cause customers to lose access to software they'd bought etc, as Microsoft’s approach allows us to still use software from multiple decades ago. (I’d gotten a piece of paid software from the iOS + iPad app store in 2011. I lost access a few years later during another Apple change.) 3. However, I think you're right that we will see more and more companies cause customers to lose access to existing software, features, etc that customers had bought, but similarly frame it as a good thing, forcing ‘modernization’, etc.
- al_borland 5mo ago
  If you’re worried about OS security patches, shouldn’t using software that hasn’t been updated in 6 years be of similar concern? I’m not arguing that software needs to be updated every 2 weeks, as is the trend now. However, 6 years, when there have been major architectural changes and UI changes. At some point the software should be deemed abandoned and it’s time to find something new. Even a simple update to support the M-series chips means the dev is still around and can release updates, even if there have been no other feature updates in 6 years as its finished software. The occasional sign of life on finished projects is helpful.
shantara 5mo ago

daneel_w 5mo ago

But Rosetta was always meant to be just a temporary compatibility bridge. Surely you too would consider it kind of crazy if they were today, still, pouring time into maintaining Rosetta 1 for people wanting to run PPC software on macOS/x86. The first Arm build of macOS is now 6 years old, and when Rosetta 2 is ultimately removed from macOS in late 2027 it will have been available to us for close to 8 years. That's a pretty generous amount of time given to us to move forward.

functionmouse 5mo ago
The work is done. Why not just leave it in? Or FOSS it so the community maintains it, like WINE?
- anon7000 5mo ago
  Apple wants everything to be consistent. I have mixed feelings on it, because I do greatly despise windows, partly because of how inconsistent everything is. It’s chock full of half finished “migrations”. Like, programs still installing to “Programs Files (x86)” Which doesn’t matter but adds the tiniest bit of friction.
  - selicos 5mo ago
    I think only 32bit apps install there. Ideally there is a 64bit version that continues forward. This is mostly an issue for me with enterprise/etc software I support at work. A key system I just moved to Server 2022 (on prem and Azure VMs) is 32-bit and still uses 32bit ODBC. It's a great app for our need. Just, still 32bit...
    - zamadatix 5mo ago
      The intent is only 32 bit apps get installed there, but there are a few problems in practice. Dunno why you're currently downvoted about it though. The first is needing to know whether the app was 32 bit or not is sort of the main annoyance with that itself. The second is not every app follows this rule correctly, for whatever reason. The third is there isn't a clear path for mixed apps, e.g. Steam. On Windows, Steam is still a mix of 32 bit and 64 bit components, so there isn't really a "clean place for it to go. You could have one option of putting Steam in one or the other and then mixing 32/64 bit apps in that folder & you have the other option of duplicating things, moving the initial problem an extra directory level deeper. 3b is that Steam installs the games under its folder, and the games you can install can be 32 bit, 64 bit, or a mix - duplicating the problem yet again. Until the start of this year, Steam still supported 32 bit Windows and, therefore, you could also have 16 bit games be installed. There were reasons to do the split in the early 2000s but holding on to each decision like this for decades after seems to cause more pain than it ends up avoiding.

sgjohnson 5mo ago

> Rosetta 2's retirement announcement was when I realized I won't buy another Mac, I'm not interested in a computer that is preoccupied with stopping me from running software. This is the 3rd time this has happened in roughly 2 decades by the way. ppc/ppc64 -> x86_64 x86_64 -> x64 only x64 -> arm64 I much prefer Apple just forcing the developers to update their apps. Perhaps it’s just me though.

Danox 5mo ago
Continue to support obsolete hardware just cause doesn’t make any sense. Apple had to move on just like they had to move away from Motorola, IBM and Intel. Apple also had to move away from AMD and Nvidia, Broadcom, and probably Qualcomm, and with the current memory crisis, Apple may have to take memory in house too. Many of the moves were done not because they wanted to, but because they had to.

cmrdporcupine 5mo ago

Right, I mean, like Jeff's content but it sort of felt like he was metaphorically "punching down" in this video. Of course Apple can make a relatively cheap mass produced device that can outcompete on price / spec -- they've been making iPads for almost two decades now. They just threw a keyboard on one and changed the bootloader to boot OSX. Good for them. 20 years of R&D paid off for one of the largest and most valued and profitable companies in the world. If I want a relatively cheap machine I can actually run Linux (or for other people, Windows) on, or can upgrade or repair... Apple is not in the running.