Three weeks ago, I used this repo to activate Sidecar on my 2013 trashcan Mac Pro and 9.7” iPad Pro.
When activating some features of Sidecar, my Mac crashed without so much as a dialog box. After three such abrupt crashes, I reverted the framework file.
IIRC there also used to be a com.apple.sidecar.display setting.
I expect the reason certain Mac and iPad models are blacklisted from Sidecar is that it was sluggish or glitchy running on them. Even on supported hardware, Sidecar is sluggish over Wi-Fi (though it works great over a wired USB-Lightning connection.)
Hmm, if only macOS had a backports system so that the best features of new releases (Dark Mode, Sidecar) could be backported to older releases (High Sierra) and you wouldn't actually have to upgrade. ;)
I can't imagine Apple doing that ever, so I guess that's an advantage of various Linux distros that support backports.
This is a blatant act of artificially making old hardware obsolete for no good reason other than force people to purchase new one. I wonder if there isn’t a law against that, at least in the EU.
They deprecate the feature on Macs without T2 chips because that's where the video stream encoding is done: in hardware. The CPU encoding performance isn't good enough.
Meanwhile, you can buy a Luna Display for your older kit to do the same thing with roughly the same performance, because that also does encoding in hardware.
And adding a new feature to newer hardware doesn't obsolete your old hardware. If Apple release a 5G phone in September, your not-5G iPhone will still work.
It's not making anything obsolete. Nobody is losing anything.
This is a new feature, which they have chosen to make available to recent hardware only.
I suppose you could argue whether the performance features of new devices is really necessary for this new feature to work well (and what does "work well" even mean - is occasional choppiness OK? How low does latency have to be?) but old devices are not losing anything because they never had this feature to begin with.
that's not how things work, apple products form an ecosystem, they work together :
i buy an ipad pro, now i'd like to use the feature with my 2013 mbp. Oh, but i can't, because it's too old ( or is it ?)
Same thing with apple watch. i "had to" buy an iphone 6 at the time because my 4gs couldn't have the apple watch software installed.
Well, the solution is easy : implement it everywhere the best you can, and make it optional so that you can disable it on slow hardware.
It's basically the way software updates has worked for ever. Only since apple ( because it controls both the hardware and software) do we see features not deployed on old hardware because it may eventually not give you the best experience.
When activating some features of Sidecar, my Mac crashed without so much as a dialog box. After three such abrupt crashes, I reverted the framework file.
YMMV