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Apple as the new M$: getting away with stuff

2 points by justaaron ↗ HN
i have OSX 10.7.5 and Apple, Homebrew, and Chrome have all announced to me that have stopped supporting this version, as it's "old"

Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP over 10 years after releasing it and people were still panicking and M$ even had to backtrack.

The new King in town (Apple) is behaving worse than the previous one, and getting away with it!

what can I do? I have a late 2011 13" MBP and specific software that cannot run on Mavericks or newer. Why are they pushing us so hard to upgrade software (and by extension, hardware)? And what can we, as consumers, do about it?

Dear Apple, knock it off!

4 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 25.1 ms ] thread
coldtea
>The new King in town (Apple) is behaving worse than the previous one, and getting away with it!

The "old King" was a monopoly (95% of the market then). And even that wasn't illegal.

They only had trouble because they used their monopoly position to threaten OEM vendors (PC makers) into certain deals.

Apple is far from a monopoly (like 15-20% of the laptop market and something like 30-40% of mobile), and stopping support for a product is not illegal.

And Microsoft supporting old OSes and browsers (IE6 etc) for ages held back the Windows ecosystem and the web for almost a decade. 10 years in IT are an eternity, and we had XP for almost as long.

>what can I do? I have a late 2011 13" MBP and specific software that cannot run on Mavericks or newer.

Is that software that critical? No alternatives available?

Its the software's vendors fault for not keeping their software up to date with OS releases (and, heck, 10.7 is 5+ years behind). Why should one software prevent you from updating your OS to the latest version? What if you wanted to buy a new computer (that would need to run the latest OS to have support for its latest generation hardware, GPU, USB3/C etc)?

cylim
You have the right choose not to use Apple, usually a major version of OS X is supported for 3years. what software you are using? built for powerpc cpu?

Apple is a hardware company yet, they are earning money by selling their products, so it is not hard to see why they keep pushing people to buy new product.

You should stated your software name, and let us see whether there is a solution for it.

brudgers
Old hardware was my introduction to Linux. A 2011 Apple computer can run the latest version of Ubuntu or many other distros. Homebrew won't matter, Chrome will run. The latest development tools -- other than those required for iOS/OSX development will be available.

Eventually, I switched from Windows completely, but it's the same thing...I removed a dependency.

Good luck.