Apple To Obsolete iPhone 4 and Late 2010 MacBook Air On October 31 (macrumors.com) 114
Apple will make all iPhone 4 models, the late 2010 13-inch MacBook Air, third-generation AirPort Extreme, and mid-2009 AirPort Time Capsule obsolete come October 31, MacRumor claims, citing a different report. From the report: Apple products on the vintage and obsolete list are no longer eligible for hardware service, beyond a few exceptions. Apple defines vintage products as those that have not been manufactured for more than five years but less than seven years ago, while obsolete products are those that were discontinued more than seven years ago. Each of the products added were released between 2009 and 2010. The report specifically pertains to Apple's vintage and obsolete products list in Japan, but the new additions will more than likely extend to the United States, Australia, Canada, and the rest of the Asia-Pacific and Europe regions.
Who Cares? (Score:1)
They do this all the time, and have for years.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Nobody really knows if the iPhone 4 existed, too.
Re: (Score:1)
I have an iPhone 4s, which is firsthand evidence. However, I'm told that the iPhone 4s was released many months after the iPhone 4, so it's not direct evidence of the iPhone 4's existence. It's merely the testimony of people who claim to have known iPhone 4.
Re: (Score:2)
'96 Civics are some good cars. Someday when I have time, I'm going to get one and put those low-profile tires on it and the ground effects and lower it and fix it up like a proper tuner. Decals. Loud stereo so I can fuck with my neighbors. I'll just set it in my driveway and wash and wax it like all the time.
Re: Five years in "vintage" (Score:4, Funny)
Worthless is in the eye of the beholder. I wouldn't go for the big spoiler, but I would very much like the loud muffler.
Nah, that's not a small penis compensator. Now THIS is a small penis compensator:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/... [disquscdn.com]
Re: (Score:1)
Enjoying your butthurt? I sure am.
Re: (Score:2)
I choose to look for the good in everyone.
Welp...
Re: Five years in "vintage" (Score:4, Funny)
FYI, mental health services and trans-cranial electro-shock therapy is covered under Obamacare.
Just saying.
Re: (Score:2)
Keep in mind some neighbors have no compunction about acting extra-judiciously to curb your behavior. First few times you might get the cops called, after that its rocks through your windows.
Re: (Score:2)
Extra-judicially, maybe. Extra-judiciously? Doubtful.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't even need that. 90's civics have easy to access electrical systems. 120V at 20 amps solves the problem very cleanly and destroys the amps and radio well before the fuses blow.
Re: (Score:2)
In most cities there are laws as to the amount of noise emitted and times of day it's emitted. In the end you'll probably have to sell that tricked out Civic to pay for your legal battle that you will undoubtedly lose.
Re: Five years in "vintage" (Score:1)
My 96 Civic must be worth a fortune.
Vintage is millennial speak for 'piece of shit'.
Re: (Score:2)
My 96 Civic must be worth a fortune.
Since you can name the year of make - yes, it is vintage. That's what vintage means. Look it up.
Queue Apple Video in 3... 2... (Score:5, Funny)
Jony Ive appears on screen, against a stark white background. "The design of our new MacBook Pro fuses form and function into a new degree of usability and intuitiveness. Once you pick it up and start using it, all of the cares of the world simply fade away behind the brilliant illumination of our Super Retina display. It's a design that is at once both futuristic, and timeless. But not TOOOOO timeless - our world class engineering teams will only support this miraculous marvel of engineering for the next five years, so get yours while you can."
Re: (Score:2)
Where's my new MacPro Tower? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ditch the grand experiment of the trash can Mac and give me a new workstation-class case.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll second that. That trash can must go, I want the nice solid tower macs back again.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd actually be happy with a solid mini. Those things rock as headless workstations, they're essentially mini pros... ;)
I'd love a mac pro tower for my graphics workstation with some number of minis for processing and server loads.
Re: (Score:1)
They "rock"? They aren't "mini pros" at all, unless by "mini pro" you mean "the opposite of pro". They have a low amount of fixed RAM and storage, low CPU performance and low GPU performance.
I have four 2012 i7 quad core minis with SSDs and 16GB RAM. They have been running just fine as low-power headless servers. I'm looking for an upgrade of those minis. The current "minis" are something I wouldn't buy except as a simple desktop as that's about all they're good for, or a doorstop if you add some double sided tape. I am looking at small form factor low-power linux systems as an alternative. I don't need GPUs and in all honesty, don't need more than 16GB RAM for the workloads in question. If I n
Re: (Score:2)
And if you don't want to pay the Apple tax, the new Mintbox Mini Pro looks like it would take care of most daily work with ease.
http://betanews.com/2016/09/28... [betanews.com]
Re:Where's my new MacPro Tower? (Score:4, Funny)
Just admit it already--you're waiting for one shaped like Yoda.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Buy a few million of them a year. The old pros didn't sell very well, they were often seen as too big and too noisy. They didn't mesh with Apple's brand image. The trash can sold well for many months.
Apple seems to be killing the desktop pros off the killed their server line. Apple liked a narrow product line. To get diversification you need volume sales. The numbers aren't there. The numbers certainly aren't there for a physically large machine.
The round Pro is a great idea (Score:1)
It just needs an update (as does the whole Mac line at this point).
The cooling design is good, and it offers plenty of expandability via ports. Make it as ugly as you like if you want to, but leave something slimmer for the rest of us that are fine with the core system plus something like a large external disk enclosure...
Re: (Score:1)
It just needs an update (as does the whole Mac line at this point).
i.e. you need to buy a new one, rather than just doing the sensible thing like replacing the GPU with something more capable like you used to be able to do with Mac Pros. It's a real wasteful consumerist mentality of throwing away things you don't need to.
Apple make a lot of good design decisions but they make a lot of crap ones too, especially with the new Pro. The worst of which is the rotation to access back ports, which of course looks nice in their marketing but in practise is completely stupid because
Re: (Score:1)
i.e. you need to buy a new one, rather than just doing the sensible thing like replacing the GPU with something more capable
You can replace the GPU, so what's your damage Heather?
Re: (Score:2)
Any significant upgrade would be replacing Broadwell or Skylake w/ Kaby Lake, and upgrading the memory and SSD densities in a workstation (Or whatever the Xeon equivalents of those CPUs are). But on the CPU front, Intel has long gotten to the point of diminishing returns, so there's nothing much to gain by updating it.
This workstation is an excellent design, and reminiscent of the stuff that used to come out once upon a time from Silicon Graphics. And the OS too is just perfect - it's FreeBSD under the
Re: (Score:1)
I know a guy who hacked his old 2009 Pro tower with two new xeons and a Titan X just to give the thing a bit more life. Made it a pretty good machine performance wise and he didn't have to throw away his old software investment. But he's already transitioning off mac, so this was to keep an old tool chain functional.
Re: (Score:1)
How many other computer companies are currently selling new hardware that's pretty much the same as their 6 yr old consumer hardware?
Um, all of them?
Two trends converge (Score:2)
Recently Slashdot ran an article about Apple hardware lagging behind the latest technologies by as much as a year or two, couple that with their decision to stop supporting hardware after seven years, and current Apple products are over-priced devices with a limited useful life, dictated by the whims of designers.
Sure, older Apple desktops and laptops are still useful after Apple drops support for the OS running on older hardware, but their usefulness diminishes without OS security patches/updates.
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah, because the OS should be free. Linux is a great example of that, its fine when it works...and you have the time to make it work. When it doesn't, you get to troll the newgroups and be abused. Winders has an interface that could knock a dead buzzard off a shit wagon at 20 paces.
Re:Two trends converge (Score:4, Funny)
When Linux doesn't meet your use case, you can fix it or pay someone to have it fixed. When OS X or Windows have the slightest bug, tough cookies, there's precisely nothing you can do.
And for this particular article, you can use Linux on that 2010 MacBook Air just fine. Linux doesn't support hardware forever -- the kernel requires at least 486 and Debian just bumped the minimal requirements for i386 to 686, but for the latter that's still good 20 years of support.
Not entirely true (Score:1)
You can write drivers for windows and if you have enough money, they will include features for you.
Re: (Score:2)
You can write drivers for windows and if you have enough money, they will include features for you.
Yeah, but the money required is quite a few orders of magnitude higher than for changes to Linux or BSD.
Re:Two trends converge (Score:4, Insightful)
When Linux doesn't meet your use case, you can fix it or pay someone to have it fixed.
Yes in theory, but in practise regular users do not do either of those things. Yes it's annoying that support for older hardware is stopped but users just buy new hardware with supported software rather than switching to Linux and paying developers to fix problems for them. In fact unless you can find a cheap developer the former is probably more cost effective anyway.
Re: (Score:1)
Since you don't have the source code and tool chain to build the proprietary software, you'll have to disassemble/decompile the software. And that, dear naive friend, is illegal under the DMCA. It doesn't matter if you do this for the greater good or just for your own use.
It's quite absurd really. If you fix a broken proprietary program you bought^W licensed then you are breaking the law.
Name one person ever prosecuted for that, without "distribution" being made of the patched code.
Re: (Score:2)
Regardless of theory versus practice, it's ILLEGAL to fix bugs in proprietary software.
I'm not talking about proprietary software or the legality of fixing bugs in it.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
When I compare it to the "high-end" Dell equipment we buy, we get about 40% longer useful life and substantially fewer ha
Huh, a 3 year old phone... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Huh, a 3 year old phone... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bingo. It does not matter when they started selling it, but when they stopped. And 3 years is pretty good compared to Android (many phones never have an up to date version available), but it is not an acceptable duration of support. Progress has slowed significantly, and most IT departments now assume a device to last for 5 years. Personally I have used older, but that does require significant compromise.
Guess I'm obsolete... (Score:1)
Still love my Aluminum Macbook from late 2008. Too old for my kids' Minecraft, but does flash games and internet in general fine.
Of course it's too slow for recent versions of MacOS, but still works nicely on the latest version of Linux Mint.
Apple hardware is still good (when they have updated specs, of course), it's just their OSs that makes things obsolete.
Re: (Score:1)
I can understand the business decisions at work here, and am glad to have an option other than ponying up for shiny new hardware.
Re: (Score:1)
The general rule of thumb is, if you're not an app dev (iphone or android) then don't buy macs. Period. The same money will get you a x3 more powerful republic of gamers or a lenovo or an xps notebook.
So sez an ANONYMOUS, COWARD.
Re:Guess I'm obsolete... (Score:4, Informative)
I just updated my 2006 Macbook Pro C2D to KUbuntu 14.04 from SnowLeopard because Chrome/Firefox don't support it anymore..
For some reason the 64 bit version couldn't boot so had to be 32bit KUbuntu. Google Chrome doesn't come for 32bit Linux, Chromium does but couldn't load pages. Fortunately Firefox still works but I fear I won't get many more years out of it.
Re: (Score:2)
I have the white Macbook 2.1 "Late 2007 Santa Rosa" 2Gb of ram max. I installed Kubuntu to get Chrome again. I only changed the battery in 2010.
REally News flash? (Score:4, Insightful)
SO everyone is up in arms that Apple is obsoleting a 6 year old phone and computer.
Yet they don't say shit when HTC/Dell/HP/Samsung does the exact same thing every year to all the models that are 1 year old or more.
Go ahead and get a Software update from HTC for that HTC ONE 7... to the latest released android.. which is version 7.0... homm wierd not even the HtC one M8 or M9 can get 7.0 installed....
Huh....
2010 MacBook users: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm running El Capitan on a late 2008 MBP with no problems. After seven years of daily use this thing just keeps running. I think too much is made of these kind of announcements.
Stopping support after 5 years is not that bad (Score:2, Funny)
You can still use your 5 year old devices, they won't spontaneously explode.
I heard that they recently contacted Samsung in order to find a way to fix this problem.
Doh (Score:1)
My mid-2010 15'' MBP still works as a champ (dual 512GB SSDs, 8GB RAM). It goes or I go.
Re: Obsolete (Score:1, Offtopic)
While we're on the subject of support for aging Apple products... SMH.
How nice of you to invent unspoken positions for Trump supporters, then trash those supporters for holding those unspoken positions you invented for them - it saves them the hard work of forming their own positions and articulating them.
These invented positions, coupled with unsubstantiated allegations about Trump, definitely convince me that you're having a hard time coming up with actual facts to discredit Trump with...
Re: (Score:1)
What positions are Trump supporters accused of holding that there is not substantial demographic evidence showing that at least millions of his supporters do hold? In short what are you talking about?
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know anything about your Telecaster but my guess it's not connected to the Internet since it was born in 1967, long before the Internet existed, so public information about it is not likely to result in any hacking of its usefulnes
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The Fender hardware could be hacked but that would occur by a repair shop and easily traced to its source.
Re: Fender to obsolete the '67 Telecaster ? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
You are arguing 'security through obscurity'. I thought we killed that line of thought years ago...
No doubt. Since Linux has by far the smallest desktop marketshare of any OS and yet has many more times the malware than does macOS (OS X).
Re: (Score:1)
If the source code for the OS in old Apple hardware were made public those old machines might become a magnet for hackers. Also, how much of the current software contains much of the old code? I wonder if the latest Mac OS is 90% the stuff that's five to seven years old. I don't know anything about your Telecaster but my guess it's not connected to the Internet since it was born in 1967, long before the Internet existed, so public information about it is not likely to result in any hacking of its usefulness.
That Fender Telecaster not only doesn't run any code; but it doesn't even have one transistor, let along the millions that are in something like a MacBook Air.
Even Guitars/Basses with "Active Electronics" are not even 1/4 as sophisticated inside as a 1960 battery-operated AM transistor radio...
Re: (Score:1)
I've got a 1967 Fender Telecaster. It's a beauty. Plays a treat. Fender probably don't support it any more but my local guitar tech can fix it as he's got wiring diagrams etc.
Bit of a difference there. Like dozens of orders of magnitude.
The "electronics" in a 1967 Fender Telecaster (like most "electric" guitars/basses) is laughably primitive. A couple of Potentiometers, a Capacitor, a 1/4" Jack, a pickup-switch (if needed) and one or more inductive pickups. We're done now.
Now, let's compare that with the electronics in a Macbook Air...