Computers age out of economically viable support (in the Apple model), but they don’t stop working. The alternatives are Windows, which has… Windows problems, or OSS, in which your computer is never supported, if it works good for you if not then pull requests welcome. It isn’t going to become a brick, and nobody’s putting a gun to your head.
But I’d still like to see Apple find a way to break free of the software-support binary—to give advanced and technical users and aging but useful hardware a space to exist in between “supported” and “unsupported.”
As long as you keep giving them your money for new Macs and iThings, why on earth would they do that?
Edited to add: I’ve wondered for a while why people bother with projects like Asahi when there are so many other excellent open source projects out there. But actually this context makes Asahi make sense to me: getting many years more usable life out of otherwise excellent hardware.
I guess I feel differently about it, because my thought is always “if you think they’re expensive as-is, imagine what they’d cost if they came with a guarantee of 15+ years of software support”.
And it’s not like Apple suddenly remotely turns off your laptop or anything. They just stop shipping software updates to you after a while. The laptop is still there. It still has all the software it came with. Except for installing new Apple-provided software updates, it can still do everything it was able to do the day before the updates stopped.
I think the angst is from people who are used to a predictable depreciation calculation experiencing a step function decrease. Macs have had a great resale value but the Intel-Apple Silicon transition has broken that. People want Apple to step in and raise the price floor for used Intel machines.
People want Apple to step in and raise the price floor for used Intel machines.
The fact a lot of the machines being dropped had a mix of design defects and being from the nadir of Apple caring about the Mac isn’t really going to help them either.
I’m still surprised by that turn-around; modern M-series Macs are so much nicer. Usually companies just collapse into a product death spiral at the point where they cease caring.
That’s the problem. Anything that is connected to a network or is getting untrusted data from removable media needs regular security updates or it will eventually be insecure and compromised. As soon as a platform becomes unsupported, the risk from using it starts to climb rapidly. This is actually worse than remotely disabling it because a lot of users don’t realise that they’re putting their data (including things like their internet banking access) at risk.
So what is your solution? Going by this definition of the “problem”, there is no acceptable timeline for eventually ceasing to provide updates, since it’s always possible that the very next day someone would begin exploiting, so does it lead to an obligation to provide support forever?
The thing that I’d like is actually a small superset of something that is in the process of becoming a legal requirement for consumer electronics in the EU:
Manufacturers must advertise the time that a device will get security updates for before you buy the device and must offer a refund proportional to the remaining amount of time if they end support before this. This lets users compare devices and provides market incentives towards longer support times. I might choose to buy a phone with a 3-year support lifetime when a competitor offers 5, but not if it’s 80% of the price of the one that lasts longer.
When support ends, the manufacturer must push a last security update that provides a user-visible notification that the device is no longer supported and may be unsafe to use on a network. This prevents users from accidentally using insecure devices (Apple is quite bad at this, they just quietly stop shipping updates) and also impacts the resale value of devices, providing an additional market incentive.
When a device exits support, the manufacturer must provide any third parties, on demand, access to all documentation and signing keys required to provide an alternative software stack. This would help reduce the environmental impact of abandoned devices by ensuring that anything widely deployed and still potentially useful could be supported by third parties or community efforts.
The first one is about to become a legal requirement in the EU. I am not sure about the second, it was in some drafts but I haven’t checked the final text. The third one is being separately proposed under right to repair legislation in a few locales.
I’m not David :) But my proposal would be: open your docs and/or source when you EOL a device, so interested volunteers can support it through open software releases.
I mean, doing that earlier than EOL would be nice :) But it does solve the EOL problem, assuming there are people sufficiently interested to pick up maintenance.
Except for installing new Apple-provided software updates, it can still do everything it was able to do the day before the updates stopped.
Yeah and that’s the problem; because the set of things it could do the day before the updates stopped didn’t include running a community-supported operating system with security fixes applied for decades after Apple decided to EOL the software support.
Well, somewhat - it’s still a WIP. But I’ll be switching to Asahi as soon as it’s available for my work M2 MBP.
My complaint was around the hand-wringing in the original article - people complaining about Apple not extending software support themselves, while simultaneously providing them a financial incentive (buying new Apple kit) to keep doing exactly that.
Computers age out of economically viable support (in the Apple model), but they don’t stop working. The alternatives are Windows, which has… Windows problems, or OSS, in which your computer is never supported, if it works good for you if not then pull requests welcome. It isn’t going to become a brick, and nobody’s putting a gun to your head.
I’m so sick of hand-wringing articles like this.
As long as you keep giving them your money for new Macs and iThings, why on earth would they do that?
Edited to add: I’ve wondered for a while why people bother with projects like Asahi when there are so many other excellent open source projects out there. But actually this context makes Asahi make sense to me: getting many years more usable life out of otherwise excellent hardware.
I guess I feel differently about it, because my thought is always “if you think they’re expensive as-is, imagine what they’d cost if they came with a guarantee of 15+ years of software support”.
And it’s not like Apple suddenly remotely turns off your laptop or anything. They just stop shipping software updates to you after a while. The laptop is still there. It still has all the software it came with. Except for installing new Apple-provided software updates, it can still do everything it was able to do the day before the updates stopped.
I think the angst is from people who are used to a predictable depreciation calculation experiencing a step function decrease. Macs have had a great resale value but the Intel-Apple Silicon transition has broken that. People want Apple to step in and raise the price floor for used Intel machines.
The fact a lot of the machines being dropped had a mix of design defects and being from the nadir of Apple caring about the Mac isn’t really going to help them either.
I’m still surprised by that turn-around; modern M-series Macs are so much nicer. Usually companies just collapse into a product death spiral at the point where they cease caring.
That’s the problem. Anything that is connected to a network or is getting untrusted data from removable media needs regular security updates or it will eventually be insecure and compromised. As soon as a platform becomes unsupported, the risk from using it starts to climb rapidly. This is actually worse than remotely disabling it because a lot of users don’t realise that they’re putting their data (including things like their internet banking access) at risk.
So what is your solution? Going by this definition of the “problem”, there is no acceptable timeline for eventually ceasing to provide updates, since it’s always possible that the very next day someone would begin exploiting, so does it lead to an obligation to provide support forever?
The thing that I’d like is actually a small superset of something that is in the process of becoming a legal requirement for consumer electronics in the EU:
The first one is about to become a legal requirement in the EU. I am not sure about the second, it was in some drafts but I haven’t checked the final text. The third one is being separately proposed under right to repair legislation in a few locales.
I’m not David :) But my proposal would be: open your docs and/or source when you EOL a device, so interested volunteers can support it through open software releases.
I mean, doing that earlier than EOL would be nice :) But it does solve the EOL problem, assuming there are people sufficiently interested to pick up maintenance.
Yeah and that’s the problem; because the set of things it could do the day before the updates stopped didn’t include running a community-supported operating system with security fixes applied for decades after Apple decided to EOL the software support.
People seem from what I’ve read to have Linux running on Intel and Apple Silicon Mac hardware. So I’m not sure what your complaint is here.
Well, somewhat - it’s still a WIP. But I’ll be switching to Asahi as soon as it’s available for my work M2 MBP.
My complaint was around the hand-wringing in the original article - people complaining about Apple not extending software support themselves, while simultaneously providing them a financial incentive (buying new Apple kit) to keep doing exactly that.