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.
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.
On the other end of the spectrum, I work with lab equipment that are more than 15 years old but still work great. The software which interfaces with it is old, but still works with Windows. Would such a thing be possible with Apple, or would Apple's insistence on upgrading every few years force the lab equipment to be replaced at significantly greater cost?
I completely agree and that's a very valid scenario. Apple tactical advantage is that consumers have completely different usage patterns and expectations than the enterprise/lab (which Apple essentially ignores). If %95 of consumers either (a) upgrade within five years or (b) are completely perplexed by the notion of updating their operating system at all, then Apple are at a huge efficiency advantage EOL-ing technologies around the five year mark. As opposed to having top engineers work on maintaining compatibility with deprecated APIs, old hardware, etc. for 15 year old software.
Macs have never really been appropriate for embedded computation, and it doesn't come up much in practice.
I work with people who work with lab software which is happily running OS X 10.2 Jaguar. It's no different than the XP box in the corner, as long as everyone understands that the checkbook has to come out when it breaks.
On the other hand, the quarter million dollar cytometer is going to be running Windows NT 4 Embedded, and when that ATA-66 hard drive fails or the software becomes unable to talk properly with the modern world anymore, it's on the vendor to make it work again. The support typically blows, but it's their problem to handle and none of them are going to be relying on Apple's memory-hole platform.
They're not gonna come and take your lab equipments away, you know... Leave them on OS X Lion for a century and you'll be okay. Just like many have left their lab computers on Windows XP for a decade.
As long as Lion gets security updates (2 years, minimum), there's absolutely no need for an upgrade. After that, you can just disconnect it from the Internet and use an stronger password.
Sorry, I said a stupid thing. You shouldn't comment when you're sleepy... I meant you can restrict remote access to them to be more safe (from trojans, etc), but somehow a stupid point about restricting "physical access" made its way into my comment and made it look ridiculous :)
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.
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.
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.
I was only thinking of security updates, new features can often be added by third parties and that leads to a healthy market that will fill the gaps on older OS versions.
HN completely ignores the class of computer users who only need Safari, Mail and some variation of Word, and then live in these apps for years without any major upgrade. In my experience, these people don't even feel entitled to any upgrade and they don't add any complexity to any testing matrix. All they need are baseline security updates, and existing services better don't stop without a plausible reason (see MobileMe). I'm not thinking of MegaCorp here, but rather my own and friends' close relatives.
The machine that got excluded from 10.8 after only 4 years was not a rev-A MacBook Air in the hands of some early adopters but a Mac Mini, the most traditional Mac money can buy. That really leaves little hope that all my "slow adopter" relatives will ever leave the Windowsverse.
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?
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.
>"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?
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)
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.
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.
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.