
Upgrade or die: Apple's re-invention of the version ratchet - lisper
http://blog.rongarret.info/2016/01/upgrade-or-die-apples-diabolical-re.html
======
mcooley
> Microsoft implemented it back in their glory days (irony intended) by
> changing the file formats in new versions of the Office suite so that
> documents created by newer versions of Office could not be read by older
> versions, thus forcing everyone to upgrade to the newer version in order to
> share data.

In fact, Microsoft released updates for older versions of Office (back to Word
2000, apparently!) which allowed them to read the new formats [1].

[1] [https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Open-a-
Word-2007-do...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Open-a-
Word-2007-document-in-an-earlier-version-of-
Word-8FE47805-64A9-4CC5-A115-B148625FE043)

~~~
nness
Not to mention the fundamental differences between pre-2007 and Office 2007
document formats. I tend to think that the format change wasn't a forced
deprecation of older software, but rather just a simple business case.
Simplify maintenance and support, and create an open-ish standard to avoid
competition + support industry.

~~~
Aloha
the old binary formats for office were the collected history of 20 years of
software development, and even Microsoft had trouble with consistent
implementation - at least OOXML had a digestible easy to use standard.

------
aftbit
>When Apple introduced El Cap, it deprecated iPhoto in favor of Photos. Photos
is missing a crucial piece of functionality: the ability to export an album as
a web page. Apple wants you to share your photos using iCloud. Well, I don't
want to use iCloud. I run my own server, and I want to share my photos there.

I'm frequently bothered by the shockingly anti-competitive nature of software
today. Walled gardens and lock-in are pretty terrifying. If you want to
continue to control your data, you can't trade control of it away to a
software company for convenience and a shiny user interface.

My collection of music managed by beets[1] (and properly id3 tagged) will
never be inaccessible to me because all of the data formats are open and
standard. If I were using iTunes, perhaps that would someday be untrue.

I'm not a big photos person - do any awesome FOSS photo management programs
exist?

[1]
[https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/guides/main.html](https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/guides/main.html)

~~~
LeoPanthera
> If I were using iTunes, perhaps that would someday be untrue.

That's simply not true. The iTunes store sells DRM-free AAC, a documented
format. You can transcode it into literally any other format, if you don't
like AAC. Ripped CDs are ripped to the format of your choice.

Only the Apple Music streaming service uses DRM - and buying a DRM-free
version of any track is literally one click away.

I can think of many things to criticise Apple for, but lock-in of your music
is not one of them.

~~~
dpark
In fairness, Apple used to encode most of the music they sold with FairPlay.
Many people probably assume they still do.

~~~
scarface74
That was over 7 years ago. How is it "fair" that people don't know?

~~~
dpark
Because why would they know? Unless they saw it in a news article, most people
probably never heard about the change.

------
jolux
>You will upgrade because all of your data will be in iCloud and all of your
finances will be in Apple Pay, and you will have no choice: you will upgrade
or die.

You can download all of your iCloud data from the web client, and Apple Pay
doesn't involve the cloud at all. It's all stored and encrypted locally and
you have to re-add your cards with every new device. (I don't even think they
persist over backups?)

>Even if Apple doesn't implement this strategy, they could, and that to me is
cause for concern. Personally, I don't want the only thing standing in the way
of being coerced in this way to buy things I don't want to be the continued
benevolence of the largest corporation in the world. I want an escape hatch to
keep Apple in check. And right now, I don't see one.

Yes, and Microsoft could do the same. Will either of them actually do so? I
doubt it, but I suppose it's possible on an infinite timeline. Keep in mind
that Apple needs a platform for their own developers to use, and for app
developers, and closing the Mac would make that very difficult. Apple also
knows how many of its customers are developers and they wouldn't just throw
that away for questionable gains. Lock-in is fragile because eventually you
get users using your stuff because they have to instead of because they want
to, which is never a good situation.

>And the tools are set up so that you can only build for supported version of
the OS.

Near as I can tell, this is false. I can set my deployment target all the way
back to OS X 10.4. Will this not work?

~~~
n0us
I went from iPhone to Android and back again to iPhone. I had no troubles at
all with either transition.

Tech journalism can be so dramatic sometimes.

~~~
rcraft
No problems with iMessage screwing you over when switching from Apple to
Android? If you ever participate in any group mms messages its borderline
impossible to escape apples ecosystem without serious drawbacks.

If you switch to android and want to still receive group mms from friends,
every member of the group mms that has an iPhone has to delete the entire
thread and start a new thread. Not only that, they each need to add you or
another non ios member as the first person in their new mms.

Pretty ridiculous and irresponsible if you ask me.

~~~
jolux
iMessage is free, SMS is not. That's the tradeoff. iMessage is also encrypted.
How do you propose adding those benefits to SMS without any cost to the user?

Exactly. iMessage exists because SMS sucks, not just because they don't want
you leaving. Same reason for the green bubbles. They know you'll berate your
Android friends into switching because of them.

~~~
ac29
SMS are free in the US on all but the lowest of the low end plans. If you are
paying for them you likely don't have a data plan to use with iMessage
anyways, or a prohbitively expensive one.

Ideally something like Signal would take off. Its free, cross-platform,
encrypted, and supports more or less everything that SMS/MMS does without
actually using those protocols.

That being said, aside from encryption, I think SMS really doesn't suck. What
messaging system exists on virtually every phone manufactured in the past 15
years, is a built in feature, isn't tied to a country, carrier, or platform,
doesn't require data service, and costs nothing or next to it?

~~~
jolux
When iMessage was created SMS wasn't free on almost every data plan. That's a
huge part of why it exists. I say it sucks because they charge for it at all
when it doesn't actually cost them anything to provide and they aren't doing a
heckuva lot of R&D work on SMS. It's also slower than iMessage and doesn't
support delivery confirmations or read receipts.

Signal is great. It would be awesome if more people used Signal. But iMessage
is the next best thing IMO and it has what really matters: users.

------
coldtea
> _This sounds like a positive development, but it 's actually an indication
> of something quite ominous that most people don't realize: for several years
> now, Apple has been deploying a strategy straight out of Microsoft's Big
> Book of Dirty Tricks which I am hereby dubbing the version ratchet. A
> version ratchet is a software deployment strategy that forces you to upgrade
> even if you don't want to._

Nothing dirty about it. If you "don't want to" just use an OS vendor that
doesn't force you. Or you can continue using your old OS on your old Mac. It's
not like it will stop working altogether -- people use Amiga computers still
with 1990-era OS/WorkbenchS from what I hear.

The alternative to what Apple does is slower OS upgrade cycles and/or devoting
resources to 5 and 10 year old OSes. Which we had with MS -- 15+ years of XP
(and a decade of IE6 dominance), holding IT back.

~~~
lisper
> Or you can continue using your old OS on your old Mac

No, that's the whole point. That _used_ to be possible, but it isn't any more
(or soon won't be).

~~~
coldtea
Continue to run doesn't mean you get free OS updates for life.

~~~
lisper
What on earth leads you to think that I expect free OS updates for life?

~~~
dpark
The way I read this, you're not asking for OS upgrades for life, but you are
asking for service support for life. You want to be able to use your old OS on
your old Mac, but you also want your old software to keep running even if it
depends on external services (which are not unchanging). Is that correct? If
so, this is not meaningfully different than expecting upgrades for life. This
is expecting perpetual backwards compatibility. If anything, lifetime upgrades
is easier.

~~~
lisper
> you are asking for service support for life

No. What I'm asking for is to not have _arbitrary_ restrictions imposed on me
if I try to maintain old software beyond its service life.

For example: I have a legally licensed copy of Snow Leopard. I would like to
be able to run it on a VM, but I can't because the license doesn't allow it.
(Yes, I know I can run Snow Leopard Server on a VM -- and I do -- but Snow
Leopard Server is not quite the same as Snow Leopard.)

I also have a legally licensed copy of Mavericks, but I have no way of doing a
clean install of Mavericks since it has been pulled from the App Store. (Yes,
I am told that some people have Mavericks in their purchased tab in the App
Store. But I don't, probably because I bought a machine that had it already
installed.) Likewise for iPhoto.

I would also like to be able to install a new version of an application while
keeping the old version. Or at the very least I would like to be able to roll
back to an old version if I don't like the new version for some reason. With
the App Store, I can't do any of these things.

~~~
dpark
I don't disagree with any of that, but that all seems unrelated to "version
ratchet". VM restrictions have nothing to do with being pushed to upgrade. The
inability to do a clean install of Mavericks kind of does, but that seems like
a crappy oversight rather than an intentional push

Same for the app rollback scenario. That seems less an intention to push
upgrades and more of a lack of investment in exposing older versions. I
suspect that many app authors are happy with this one, though, because it
reduces their support costs because the number of old installs can only
decrease over time.

------
mietek
_> The only way you can run Lion nowadays is if you find a working machine
that has Lion installed on it._

No. If you’ve previously purchased OS X Lion, you can still download it via
the App Store, but it won’t be included in your list of purchased items by
default.

To fix this, choose the “View My Account” command from the “Store” menu, and
click the “Manage” link next to the “Hidden Purchases” field. You’ll now be
able to unhide each hidden item by clicking the appropriate “Unhide” button.

~~~
dba7dba
3 clicks to do just that?

~~~
awad
Really?

------
Silhouette
I like the term "version ratcheting". It captures the essence of a
particularly insidious disease that is currently plaguing our industry.

There are several other variations that are starting to become widespread as
well. A lot of professional software, the kind of stuff that costs 4+ figures
for a permanent licence, is seriously defective when first shipped and then
receives updates, perhaps via some proprietary tool. What happens if you need
to reinstall it but the updates are no longer available, or the update files
are available but the tool no longer functions to install them as you could
before?

A lot of professional software also requires some form of activation, and may
provide a related tool to migrate a licence from one PC to another. Again,
what happens if you have a properly purchased copy and want to use it
according to your agreement but the developers have turned off the lights on
the activation server?

I suspect laws are going to have to change before too long to keep up with the
real relationships involved in modern software. Normal commercial agreements
between a purchaser and a vendor don't really cut it in 2016, because the
third party -- the software developer -- has a much bigger role in the ongoing
nature of how the software works. Turning a blind eye to defective software
has worked reasonably well in practice as long as we had the gentleman's
agreement that developers would provide free updates to correct the serious
flaws anyway, but increasingly that is no longer the case or the updates come
with strings attached.

In an age of DRM, activation, automatic updates, dependence on remote systems,
and the like, it might be necessary to start imposing statutory requirements
on vendors _and_ original developers responsible for software, to ensure that
users can continue to enjoy what they were actually agreeing to pay for in the
first place or receive suitable compensation. It might also be necessary to
enforce minimum periods of support for permanent licences, and to limit the
kinds of lock-in that can be applied with temporary licences or online
components, in order to follow the same basic principles of consumer
protection and fair competition as other fields.

------
fishanz
I'm also really purturbed by apple's 'version ratchet' (great term btw). In my
case it's the infuriation caused by the 'notifications' to upgrade ... Which
you CANT DISMISS! It's either install, or 'remind me later':
tonight..tomorrow, but explicitly not 'never for this version'. I've turned
off notifications altogether on Yosemite. Ios9 is the icing on the cake.

~~~
ajmurmann
What about security vulnerabilities that get fixed in those updates? You don't
want those?

This got us Chinese bot nets on outdated XP machines...

~~~
grandalf
This is exactly the issue. It is irresponsible for a vendor not to nudge users
toward upgrading when older versions no longer make sense to support.

~~~
fishanz
'Nudging' me to update from Yosemite to El Capitan is just annoying. It's one
iteration!

------
cthulhua
This is a logical consequence of non-free software. I'd add that even in the
free software case, there's a non-zero cost to supporting legacy software as
first-class citizens, to the point where it often just doesn't make sense.

~~~
Aloha
Its a logical consequence of resource limits, technical debt is expensive, and
must be resolved eventually. There is a reason that support for GTK 1.x
applications vanished over time, as well as ones that needed old compilers,
tied to old library version, and old versions of glibc.

------
Joof
So basically the cloud model removes power from the consumer. Nothing new
here, but a good reminder.

------
carsongross
I've ended up using third party apps that aren't sold through the app store.
More and more developers are getting sick of apples shit, and a lot of good-
enough alternatives exist out there that you can have a decent setup without
dealing with it.

The app store is such a clusterfuck anyway, I hardly ever open it except by
accident.

------
voltagex_
I'm pretty sure if you can get your hands on the App/DMG version of Lion, it's
possible to create an ISO, or at least a bootable thumbdrive. That's what the
Hackintosh folk do.

~~~
tim333
kat.cr have torrents of all the old Mac OSs

~~~
walterbell
Is there a list of known-good hashes for official Mac installers?

~~~
notpeter
There is now.

[https://github.com/notpeter/apple-installer-
checksums](https://github.com/notpeter/apple-installer-checksums)

~~~
walterbell
Thank you!

------
rsync
"And nowadays everything is in the app store, including the developer tools.
And the tools are set up so that you can only build for supported version of
the OS. It is still possible to use XCode to build an application for Snow
Leopard because you can still get an old XCode install DVD and an old Snow
Leopard install DVD, and if you get Snow Leopard Server you can even run it on
a VM. So no matter what Apple does, you can run Snow Leopard forever if you
want to."

Sigh. That makes me very happy.

It also makes me very happy that I saved, into cold storage, every single .iso
and .pkg and ... everything ... that I ever downloaded from the apple
developers site. The old apple dev resources/download site was too good to be
true - you knew it was going to go away.

~~~
qzervaas
You can download the newest Xcode et al without the App Store, from here:

[https://developer.apple.com/downloads/](https://developer.apple.com/downloads/)

(Edit: You can download Xcode all the way back to Xcode 2.3 from 2006)

------
jrbapna
On the positive side, a quicker upgrade curve helps developers iterate faster,
and improves software quality as a whole. Our team is much more effective when
we know we only have to support the latest 2-3 releases of our app, and we can
simply prompt anyone using anything older to upgrade.

------
shurcooL
They day I no longer want to use Apple's latest stable versions of software is
the day I'll start thinking about migrating away.

Also, this is why I invest my free time into pushing open source forward, so
it can displace the few closed source things I still use/depend on.

------
dba7dba
Another good example is exporting Notes files from iPad. You HAVE to have 10.9
OS X on your laptop. With all those engineers on payroll they can't allow
exporting to older OS?

------
notliketherest
I just don't understand why people cling to the old version of software
(barring some crazy malfeasance by the developer or something..). I've got all
of my apps on auto upgrade. Also, as an app developer, this is an endless pain
in my ass.

~~~
lisper
FWIW, I'm "clinging" to Mavericks because nothing beyond it will run iPhoto.
Also, I really hate the new "flat look."

------
steele
>That's fair enough; you can't expect OS vendors to support ancient hardware
forever.

The direct Microsoft criticism and definition of 'ancient hardware' seems
entirely... Apple reality distortion filter

~~~
benevol
_you can 't expect OS vendors to support ancient hardware forever_

That's funny, because that's pretty much what I've been experiencing with
Ubuntu during the last decade.

Not only do I really OWN my hardware and get to decide WHEN and IF I want to
spend money for a new machine or not, but the hardware support gets even more
complete with every passing month.

To sum it up, time is on YOUR side, not on some company's side.

