Even though I don't really use it, this really frustrates me.
Apple is moving iCloud further into macOS and making the Mac more akin to an Apple Chromebook with every release. Time Machine gets little to no love, and users are getting steered ever more strongly towards backing up data onto iCloud.
Even buying an Apple device isn't really buying a device anymore. You're really buying a transferable lease for 6-7 years on a device that has a hard stop to go to landfill after that time due to software obsolescence by way of unpatched vulnerabilities.
I don't actually dislike Chromebooks at all, but this is saddening when you've bought a computer to use it as a computer and any sense of ownership or agency is quietly clawed away.
> Time Machine gets little to no love, and users are getting steered ever more strongly towards backing up data onto iCloud.
Is there a platform other than Linux that doesn't push integration with cloud services? Windows pushes OneDrive, and Google pushes Google Drive on their platforms.
Also, I would argue that Time Machine gets little to no love because it's nearly feature complete. It's dead simple to use, does what it says on the tin, and stays out of the way to the point I forget about it most of the time. Is there anything in particular that you feel that Time Machine is missing?
> Even buying an Apple device isn't really buying a device anymore. You're really buying a transferable lease for 6-7 years on a device that has a hard stop to go to landfill after that time due to software obsolescence by way of unpatched vulnerabilities.
Again, is there a platform other than Linux that isn't similar? Also, with the progress that the Asahi Linux project is making it should be very feasible to slap Linux on an M1 Mac as soon as it goes out of support.
> I don't actually dislike Chromebooks at all, but this is saddening when you've bought a computer to use it as a computer and any sense of ownership or agency is quietly clawed away.
I keep seeing vague hand wavy claims like this on HN, but I feel that Windows, Chromebooks, and Macs are still very open to tinkering.
> Also, I would argue that Time Machine gets little to no love because it's nearly feature complete. It's dead simple to use, does what it says on the tin, and stays out of the way to the point I forget about it most of the time. Is there anything in particular that you feel that Time Machine is missing?
I almost completely agree with this, but do like the scheduling features of the free third-party "TimeMachineEditor" tool, which lets you control the backup intervals, windows, and set an exclusion window. Otherwise, TM has been pretty flawless for me.
My 5 year old laptop supports Windows 11 which means that it will likely get updates for another 5-6 years from today. That's a total of at least 10-11 years of support.
This tends to vary by generation (my laptop is just new enough for official Windows 11 support) but I think in any case is quite impressive. And of course after 2028 or whatever I can throw Linux on it and use it for another few years.
> Again, is there a platform other than Linux that isn't similar?
Windows. If you buy a Windows computer it will retain software support for many, many years - and support for new versions is never arbitrarily withdrawn based on device age.
The only restriction I know of in the Windows 11 migration was that it would insist on TPM2 support (and for very good reasons).
Macs do have Asahi Linux in the pipeline, but the arbitrary withdrawal of support on the basis of not having bought an entirely new computer from the same vendor in X number of years is really anti-consumer, and I’m surprised it’s not illegal.
Even in the Windows world, if a new major version comes out you could pay to upgrade (even though I don’t believe end users have had to do that for several major releases now).
Doesn’t seem like Apple shutting down this old, likely unpopular feature is evidence of Apple turning the Mac into an “Apple Chromebook”.
There is no “hard stop” on the life time of a Mac. Yeah Apple will eventually stop updating the software but this has always been true. If anything this situation is much better that it ever has been with free OS updates.
Finally even if there was a hard stop Apple will gladly recycle your product. No need for it to go to a landfill.
And what Mac has ever stopped getting security updates after 6-7 years?
The 2016 (first TouchBar year) is one of the shorter ones for newest-OS-support, only running up to macOS 12 (Monterey). That was released in 2021 and got its latest security update on 2023-06-21.
Going back further, the 2014 Macbook Pro supports macOS 11 (Big Sur), which was released in 2020 and also got a security update on 2023-06-21.
You have to go back to macOS 10.15 (Catalina) released in 2020 to find a version that hasn't had a security update this year. Which MBP models are stuck at Catalina? Mid 2012 to early 2013. That's 7-8 years with the newest OS, then another 2ish years of security updates.
10 years is far from perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than 6.
[ISL@home:~]$ lscpu | grep -i intel
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3330 CPU @ 3.00GHz
[ISL@home:~]$ uname -a
Linux home 6.1.0-6-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.15-1 (2023-03-05) x86_64 GNU/Linux
[ISL@home:~]$
The i5-3330 went EOL in 2014, released in 2012. An up-to-date first-class Debian system on decade-old hardware is just a sudo apt update; sudo apt dist-upgrade away.
It is a real bummer that the major hardware vendors choose not to open up their devices when they reach end of life. Phones and old hardware are frequently viable for double their enforced service-lives or longer.
replaced my MacBook Pro after 10 years, not having the latest OS didn't bother me at all with it. Only had to spend $100 on a new battery for it after 5 years. in total, came out to $10.83 a month for the life of my MBP and it still works i just finally needed the ARM version for something.
> You're really buying a transferable lease for 6-7 years on a device that has a hard stop to go to landfill after that time due to software obsolescence by way of unpatched vulnerabilities.
If you define a lease as a period of time where a device gets security patches, has this ever not been the case?
Some others here are comparing to Windows but the parent commenter here was saying it was a shift for Apple, so here's a snapshot of that from a machine I used to own:
10.3 Panther required a G3 or better and USB, which (in laptop-land) dropped the pre-Lombard G3 Powerbooks from 1998. So the 2003 OS dropped 1998 machines, so just 4 years of coverage.
"Security vulnerabilities" weren't exactly the same thing in those days as they are today, with less online apps, but in a way it was also more obsolete more quickly because hardware moved quickly: you could have a 233Mhz to 300Mhz 1998 G3, but the new 2003 Powerbook G4s were clocked at 867Mhz-1.25Ghz - nearly 4x across the board.
I get more usage out of 5+ year old Macs now than I ever did in the past.
Well, sucks if you bought a Windows 10 device with an Intel 7th Gen processor in the first half of 2017. You will only be getting... ~8 years, just like Apple more or less; even if most PCs will probably last longer than that.
As for, "well we can install Linux..." that doesn't make even a measurable dent in e-waste.
Time machine works without questions, and handles restores with perfection for users who don't know what a file system may or may not be. What features do you feel is missing?
Not every piece of software needs constant updates, sometimes they are feature complete.
> You're really buying a transferable lease for 6-7 years on a device that has a hard stop to go to landfill after that time due to software obsolescence by way of unpatched vulnerabilities.
I'm still rocking an iPhone 7 Plus and it's still getting updates even though it's seven years old. If anything the main thing that seems like it'll make me upgrade eventually is the battery life. It's not lasting anywhere near as long as it used to.
Although it looks like I can still get that replaced from Apple, so I might just do that.
looks like iphone 7 didn't get ios 16 - is that right?
depending on what you do with it, it may work well enough for a while longer, but at some point, some activities won't be supported - banking/finance apps are the big ones I know will stop supporting earlier ios versions sooner or later. My bank's app requires ios 14 min. I suspect they may bump that to 15 or 16 in the next year or so.
> You're really buying a transferable lease for 6-7 years on a device that has a hard stop to go to landfill after that time due to software obsolescence by way of unpatched vulnerabilities.
I'm still using my 2012 MBPs for various purposes, such as playing videos and music for the whole family or music creation. Yes, I can't put newer versions of software on it, but I'm quite happy with what I bought. I just replace the battery every couple of years (because in these old models - I can!).
Counterpoint: Time Machine just works and doesn't need any love; the only thing I'd like to see is for it to be able to backup to iCloud – something you view as a downside.
This is a feature that’s long been superseded by iCloud Photos and it’s been disabled by default on new installations of iOS for years. I don’t think anyone will miss it.
Not for people like me that refuse to use iCloud or store personal data (photos, videos) on any cloud service. I’m especially annoyed they put Find My and Apple Pay behind iCloud which means I can’t use it.
Free way to share photos across all your devices. Super great feature when I tuned off iCloud Photos due to costs. I’ll miss it, this won’t push me to shell out for iCloud storage though.
Our family is using Amazon Photos with Family Vault feature that collects photos in one place. We use Amazon Echo Show to display the photos. We got tired by Echo's spam (we want to use only for photo frame and other features) and we would like to transition to iCloud Photos but we cannot find a similar solution.
Can anyone recommend a good set up with iCloud Photos and some sort of hardware to view our photos on an always on display? We do not wish to manually copy our photos to be clear.
An iPad mounted to a wall or on a stand would be my suggestion. You can leave it plugged in and set the display to never turn off.
There are a few different ways you could display your photos. One way would be to set the lock screen wallpaper to shuffle photos. The benefit of this approach is it leaves your iPad in a pretty normal state, easy to unlock and use at any time. However, your photo frame is then limited to the customizations you can make to the lock screen, which is still pretty good for your use case and has gotten better recently.
Another option would be to set up a slideshow in the Photos app or similar and then use Guided Access to keep the screen locked to that app or slideshow. The benefit of this approach is that you can display anything with tons of customization. However, there’s a bit of extra complexity in setting it up, unlocking the device to use it if you need to, and setting it up again afterward.
My advice is to try the lock screen wallpaper approach first and then switch to Guided Access if you don’t like it.
The last piece is making sure you have all the right photos from the whole family. For that, use an iCloud Shared Photo Library.
Why don't they just migrate everything to iCloud for you? This is a very clunky deprecation path, and people *will* lose precious photos because of this.
> This is a very clunky deprecation path, and people will* lose precious photos because of this.*
Probably not, since the very small number of people who used it were warned many times, and My Photo Stream was always a temporary destination (photos went away after 30 days).
It's a service that existed three years before iCloud Photo syncing, being released in 2011 with iCloud in 2014. It's safe to say almost everyone uses iCloud.
It appears that it let you "stream" your photos to other devices without having to plug them in, but photos were only saved for 30 days if you didn't save them to local storage from the stream. So it wasn't really a storage product as much as a weird, convenient? way to move photos from an iPad to a Mac, for example.
The idea of photo stream was that you could have your photos on more than one of your devices but not stored on an ongoing basis in the cloud.
The photos would be stored in the cloud for up to 30 days to allow each of your subscribed devices to download them within locally within that timeframe, then would be deleted.
If the fiercest complaint you can muster is that Apple is shutting down a service that was, by today's standards, poorly designed and risky to use (photos only existed for 30 days if you didn't save them) and that has been superseded by a much better product (iCloud) for more than 9 years, well, I guess you must have more time on your hands to be outraged about product decisions than I do.
Bootcamp. Actual rosetta that can run 32 bit or powerpc apps. Airport and Time Capsule. The list goes on of pretty nice software and hardware that apple has abandoned over the years. I think a website like this would be pretty interesting to see all the products and features we've lost through the years.
Readit News
Apple is moving iCloud further into macOS and making the Mac more akin to an Apple Chromebook with every release. Time Machine gets little to no love, and users are getting steered ever more strongly towards backing up data onto iCloud.
Even buying an Apple device isn't really buying a device anymore. You're really buying a transferable lease for 6-7 years on a device that has a hard stop to go to landfill after that time due to software obsolescence by way of unpatched vulnerabilities.
I don't actually dislike Chromebooks at all, but this is saddening when you've bought a computer to use it as a computer and any sense of ownership or agency is quietly clawed away.
Is there a platform other than Linux that doesn't push integration with cloud services? Windows pushes OneDrive, and Google pushes Google Drive on their platforms.
Also, I would argue that Time Machine gets little to no love because it's nearly feature complete. It's dead simple to use, does what it says on the tin, and stays out of the way to the point I forget about it most of the time. Is there anything in particular that you feel that Time Machine is missing?
> Even buying an Apple device isn't really buying a device anymore. You're really buying a transferable lease for 6-7 years on a device that has a hard stop to go to landfill after that time due to software obsolescence by way of unpatched vulnerabilities.
Again, is there a platform other than Linux that isn't similar? Also, with the progress that the Asahi Linux project is making it should be very feasible to slap Linux on an M1 Mac as soon as it goes out of support.
> I don't actually dislike Chromebooks at all, but this is saddening when you've bought a computer to use it as a computer and any sense of ownership or agency is quietly clawed away.
I keep seeing vague hand wavy claims like this on HN, but I feel that Windows, Chromebooks, and Macs are still very open to tinkering.
I almost completely agree with this, but do like the scheduling features of the free third-party "TimeMachineEditor" tool, which lets you control the backup intervals, windows, and set an exclusion window. Otherwise, TM has been pretty flawless for me.
This tends to vary by generation (my laptop is just new enough for official Windows 11 support) but I think in any case is quite impressive. And of course after 2028 or whatever I can throw Linux on it and use it for another few years.
Windows. If you buy a Windows computer it will retain software support for many, many years - and support for new versions is never arbitrarily withdrawn based on device age.
The only restriction I know of in the Windows 11 migration was that it would insist on TPM2 support (and for very good reasons).
Macs do have Asahi Linux in the pipeline, but the arbitrary withdrawal of support on the basis of not having bought an entirely new computer from the same vendor in X number of years is really anti-consumer, and I’m surprised it’s not illegal.
Even in the Windows world, if a new major version comes out you could pay to upgrade (even though I don’t believe end users have had to do that for several major releases now).
There is no “hard stop” on the life time of a Mac. Yeah Apple will eventually stop updating the software but this has always been true. If anything this situation is much better that it ever has been with free OS updates.
Finally even if there was a hard stop Apple will gladly recycle your product. No need for it to go to a landfill.
The 2016 (first TouchBar year) is one of the shorter ones for newest-OS-support, only running up to macOS 12 (Monterey). That was released in 2021 and got its latest security update on 2023-06-21.
Going back further, the 2014 Macbook Pro supports macOS 11 (Big Sur), which was released in 2020 and also got a security update on 2023-06-21.
You have to go back to macOS 10.15 (Catalina) released in 2020 to find a version that hasn't had a security update this year. Which MBP models are stuck at Catalina? Mid 2012 to early 2013. That's 7-8 years with the newest OS, then another 2ish years of security updates.
10 years is far from perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than 6.
It is a real bummer that the major hardware vendors choose not to open up their devices when they reach end of life. Phones and old hardware are frequently viable for double their enforced service-lives or longer.
If you define a lease as a period of time where a device gets security patches, has this ever not been the case?
10.3 Panther required a G3 or better and USB, which (in laptop-land) dropped the pre-Lombard G3 Powerbooks from 1998. So the 2003 OS dropped 1998 machines, so just 4 years of coverage.
"Security vulnerabilities" weren't exactly the same thing in those days as they are today, with less online apps, but in a way it was also more obsolete more quickly because hardware moved quickly: you could have a 233Mhz to 300Mhz 1998 G3, but the new 2003 Powerbook G4s were clocked at 867Mhz-1.25Ghz - nearly 4x across the board.
I get more usage out of 5+ year old Macs now than I ever did in the past.
Well, sucks if you bought a Windows 10 device with an Intel 7th Gen processor in the first half of 2017. You will only be getting... ~8 years, just like Apple more or less; even if most PCs will probably last longer than that.
As for, "well we can install Linux..." that doesn't make even a measurable dent in e-waste.
Windows XP got patches for over 10 years IIRC. It was a different time, but you did ask "ever"
Being able to access the same files across MacOS and iOS without doing anything special is amazingly convenient.
Time machine works without questions, and handles restores with perfection for users who don't know what a file system may or may not be. What features do you feel is missing?
Not every piece of software needs constant updates, sometimes they are feature complete.
I'm still rocking an iPhone 7 Plus and it's still getting updates even though it's seven years old. If anything the main thing that seems like it'll make me upgrade eventually is the battery life. It's not lasting anywhere near as long as it used to.
Although it looks like I can still get that replaced from Apple, so I might just do that.
depending on what you do with it, it may work well enough for a while longer, but at some point, some activities won't be supported - banking/finance apps are the big ones I know will stop supporting earlier ios versions sooner or later. My bank's app requires ios 14 min. I suspect they may bump that to 15 or 16 in the next year or so.
I'm still using my 2012 MBPs for various purposes, such as playing videos and music for the whole family or music creation. Yes, I can't put newer versions of software on it, but I'm quite happy with what I bought. I just replace the battery every couple of years (because in these old models - I can!).
Deleted Comment
The 5s from 2013 had a patch in January.
Can anyone recommend a good set up with iCloud Photos and some sort of hardware to view our photos on an always on display? We do not wish to manually copy our photos to be clear.
There are a few different ways you could display your photos. One way would be to set the lock screen wallpaper to shuffle photos. The benefit of this approach is it leaves your iPad in a pretty normal state, easy to unlock and use at any time. However, your photo frame is then limited to the customizations you can make to the lock screen, which is still pretty good for your use case and has gotten better recently.
Another option would be to set up a slideshow in the Photos app or similar and then use Guided Access to keep the screen locked to that app or slideshow. The benefit of this approach is that you can display anything with tons of customization. However, there’s a bit of extra complexity in setting it up, unlocking the device to use it if you need to, and setting it up again afterward.
My advice is to try the lock screen wallpaper approach first and then switch to Guided Access if you don’t like it.
The last piece is making sure you have all the right photos from the whole family. For that, use an iCloud Shared Photo Library.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213248
Badly managed.
Probably not, since the very small number of people who used it were warned many times, and My Photo Stream was always a temporary destination (photos went away after 30 days).
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201317
It's a service that existed three years before iCloud Photo syncing, being released in 2011 with iCloud in 2014. It's safe to say almost everyone uses iCloud.
It appears that it let you "stream" your photos to other devices without having to plug them in, but photos were only saved for 30 days if you didn't save them to local storage from the stream. So it wasn't really a storage product as much as a weird, convenient? way to move photos from an iPad to a Mac, for example.
The photos would be stored in the cloud for up to 30 days to allow each of your subscribed devices to download them within locally within that timeframe, then would be deleted.
Deleted Comment
If the fiercest complaint you can muster is that Apple is shutting down a service that was, by today's standards, poorly designed and risky to use (photos only existed for 30 days if you didn't save them) and that has been superseded by a much better product (iCloud) for more than 9 years, well, I guess you must have more time on your hands to be outraged about product decisions than I do.
They killed the audio jack. That's pretty heinous.
And they removed the sim slot.
And the finger print reader.
And they actively try to kill 3rd party repair.