Snow Leopard Drops Palm OS Sync 290
adeelarshad82 writes "It's been just a little over a month since Apple blocked iTunes sync with Palm Pre, and now Apple takes that strategy one step further by blocking Snow Leopard sync with Palm-OS powered smartphones. Even though Palm has officially retired Palm OS and is now focusing hard on its next-generation WebOS in the Palm Pre, the company is still selling Palm OS-powered smartphones; two current models are the Treo Pro on Sprint and the Centro."
Re:Stay classy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Trollbait (Score:5, Interesting)
It cost money to continue shipping floppy disks, it does not cost any more money to keep syncing with Palm devices.
Of course it costs money to keep syncing with deprecated hardware. Apple will have to support this software bridge for the lifetime of Snow Leopard (2 years? 4? more?). Cutting out essentially deprecated software will make the OS easier (and cheaper) for Apple to support in the long run.
That being said, I have no doubt that the upper management at Apple was all smiles when the announcement was made that PalmOS Sync was being dropped.
Re:Stay classy (Score:0, Interesting)
Is there a special place in hell for morons like you who just bash MS?
Windows 7 is a very good operating system by all sensible accounts.
Probably, there is probably also a special place in hell for companies that abuse monopolies and feel they are above the law.
Re:Ugh (Score:2, Interesting)
10.6 probably DOES work with your 1998 Winprinter if you have a parallel to USB adapter. Thank you, Gutenprint.
Legacy technology (Score:3, Interesting)
Who decides what technology has become "legacy"?
Fairly often it is Apple - for better or worse. They're not always the first but when Apple decides something is no longer worth including in their computers, other PC makers often follow suit. They really were the big influence that finally got everyone to drop 1.44MB floppies even though everyone knew for years that they were a technology well past it's prime. They also were ahead of the curve on eliminating 1.2MB floppy drives, DB9 and DB25 serial ports, and a number of other ports. There are other examples besides. Apple isn't always right and not always first, but they are almost always influential.
Re:Palm has retired the OS (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who is still holding onto his Zire (five years now?) and is about to upgrade to Snow Leopard: this isn't going to impact me because it only changes syncing the Apple calendars and contacts. Sure it would be nice if Apple supported the conduit but I figure it simply: Microsoft never supported ActiveSync for PalmOS, why are people getting concerned when Apple is dropping support for PalmOS since they were the ones writing it themselves not the product vendor? Given Palm's recent bout of laziness in abusing iTunes to support their device, I can't fault Apple for not wanting to support Palm's unsupported proprietary device.
It would be nice if it was all integrated but I'm still going to be able to sync my device using the ancient Palm Desktop tool. There is the Missing Sync which provides support for the Palm under Mac. All that is happening is that Apple isn't shipping some code they wrote probably because it was going to be a pain to port it to 64-bit.
To be quite honest, so far they've gone above and beyond.
Direct your flame to Palm, not Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't guarantee anything but, as Leopard which you boo boo is a Unix 03 compliant operating system with entire toolchain to support open source software, Fink Project and Macports did considerable amount of work to make automated package management.
I know Fink and it has some Palm related software but I have never,ever saw a Palm in my life to begin with so I can't guarantee anything.
http://www.finkproject.org/ [finkproject.org] (official site)
http://pdb.finkproject.org/ [finkproject.org] (Package Database web interface)
So, no need to go Linux just to have Palm support. While people buy OS X, they also buy UNIX.
I know one way or another, you can get Sync support under snow leopard but let me tell you something. If I was a Palm owner, I would be having very nice and polite communication with Palm Inc. over this. They should spend money to hire couple of Cocoa/OS X developers rather than renting some astroturfers and shady blogs.
Re:Stay classy (Score:4, Interesting)
There's already a solution, in Missing Sync for Palm OS [markspace.com], which already handles synching to more recent Palm devices (Centro and Treo) much better than Apple's legacy support. I don't know anyone who has a Mac and a Treo and /doesn't/ already use Missing Sync anyway over Apple's grotty and outdated legacy Palm code. I would guess that Apple yanking Palm OS support from iSync and letting Missing Sync fill that particular slot in the Sync Services food chain is an acknowledgment of that fact.