Unfortunately they have other ways to deprecate your device: App Stores won't work, apps won't talk to their backend with older versions or just straight up won't launch. Even Homebrew stopped supporting my 2015 Macbook I have for personal use.
Right, I think that was the point being made: I've had a closet of Apple hardware with no technical problems, but made useless due to Apple's software decisions.
With older Apple hardware you can usually find a working OS image, but Apple specifically is very strict with minimum OS versions for apps and deprecating APIs so that older iOS and macOS versions end up unable to install any software that hasn't had an older version archived somewhere, even if there's no real reason it shouldn't run on the hardware. You can only get older compatible versions of apps in the App Store if you happened to have purchased them before, again for no real reason other than inconvenience
> that older iOS and macOS versions end up unable to install any software that hasn't had an older version archived somewhere
iOS, sure. After a certain point, you need to be fine with simple functionality (but, I’ll add, more than adequate for most users, which means someone else could find use and value for what you treat as junk).
But macOS? What software? Everything I’m thinking of is graphics adjacent and significantly benefits from faster hardware. For almost everything else, a browser suffices.
No, what Apple made into junk by remotely flipping a switch. On an older iOS, you cannot log into your Apple ID any more, which then means you cannot update the OS any more. So you cannot upgrade, but you also cannot use the old OS for anything that requires you to be logged into your Apple account (which is practically everything). But you still get nagged at every turn that you need to log in and upgrade!
I downgraded an old Macbook last year to see if I could get it running fast again. I couldn't install all sorts of things. So many things that I gave up.
I don't know where this whole "Apple is slowing down my device" comes from, but it is misguided at best, and outright false at worst. My decades old iPod Touch, for example, still works today without performance issues. My oldest iPhones have no performance issues either, and they are (respectively) 9 and 10 years old. Do they still receive updates? Of course not! Neither do any of the other devices I have from the same era. My PC, built around the same time, doesn't even support Windows 11, and hasn't received a single BIOS update since 2020.
Apple was slowing down phones for a while, however, the general public entirely misunderstood why: At a certain point, the battery could not maintain the voltages required to keep the phone operating properly at all (if you understand silicon, you will understand why...CPU needs 1.5v, battery can provide 1.4v...and boom!), so Apple did the most graceful thing they could and they down clocked the phones rather than letting them abruptly turn off. That led to millions of people in a certain era of iPhone being able to use their phones...just more slowly...vs not being able to use them the second voltage > supply voltage...which basically means any remotely demanding app. They were (rightfully) sued because they made the change without informing the user first. They didn't have to touch the phones, period. They tried to allow the phones to be used/data recovered from gracefully.
Don't misunderstand me, I am not willing to defend the practices of any business at all, especially Apple (I've worked from, and walked away from, some despicable companies in my time as an engineer), however Apple went above and beyond to let folks continue to use their devices. If you think otherwise, I've a box full of android and non Android phones and tablets that the likes of Google, Samsung, LG, HTC, etc. all quickly abandoned.
For comparison, the Google Pixel 3a (among others) was released the same year and saw it's last major OS update in 2022. iPhone 11? Still receives updates to this day. No, they aren't slowing the phone down. Trust me, my non technical spouse would have complained super loudly by now. More importantly, I, as her tech support person would've. She is on 26.2 right now.
There is a time and place to bash Apple, however hardware/software support definitely isn't the place. If you think that the current OS/update you have installed is purposefully and intentionally slowing your phone in order to push you to update, please feel free to publish your testing and results...and make sure you isolate every other variable like filling up internal storage, running 50,000 apps at once, expecting any application made within the past 6-7 years to peform at top speed, etc.
Also make sure you aren't falling for things such as confirmation bias or worse: you simply parrot what others say because your decade old phone, much like your decade old PC,feels slower now than it did a decade ago, when apps and games were simpler, and didn't embed entire browser engines in order to display content.
Cheers, btw, and I mean no disrespect to anyone. Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays.
I have a 4 year old M1 macbook pro running macos 12. It runs as good as when it was new. So you honestly think that if I upgrade it to macos 26 it wont start lagging? I am extremely confident that it will. Even without changing the other software running on it.
Honestly, the closet I mentioned were late PPC to mid Intel era. Those machines (putting aside the architecture changes) regularly outlived their ability to practically run the latest Mac OS, full stop. I am not even willing to say that wasn't intentional, because it was so conspicuous. Perhaps it wasn't 'designed' to do that, but minimally, I can say Apple did not maintain what I would consider minimum performance standards for the hardware they claimed their OS to support.
Maybe that's ancient history now, but from what it sounds like, they still have users that distrust their releases. When you say "I don't know where this is coming from" then a few lines later describe the known practice and the reason, well there you are. I guess it's a brand trust thing, and it sticks.
Same here. Pretty amazing. Almost every game in my (large) Steam libarary runs out of the box. Performance is on par with Windows. This finally allowed me to ditch Windows.
And no, I don't bother with crap that needs a kernel level anti-cheat. Simply not for me.
I'm still rocking a refurbished Macbook Pro 2015 CTO model. I was planning on upgrading this year or the next because of the Mx chip, but it seems like with the latest MacOS version, Apple software is falling to Jevons paradox: even though compute is becoming extremely fast, Apple is deciding to spend that extra compute on things not important to me (fancy glass effects).
I'm gonna wait out a bit longer and see if I can get away with using only my Linux Desktop.
The Amazon forest is unique in many ways but most importantly because unlike other forests, it CANNOT grow back. The reason for this is that it is a leftover from when the planet was covered in rainforests because it was a lot warmer and wetter in the Eocene epoch. The forest is sustained by the rain it creates from itself. Once the trees are gone, the water will be gone. [1] We also have reasons to think this self-sustaining climate is going to collapse soon [2]
So far the best way to protect it I have found is through the Rainforest Trust [3] which is a foundation that's trying to purchase and protect parts of the rainforests that companies would otherwise cut or burn down for agricultural use.
> The reason for this is that it is a leftover from when the planet was covered in rainforests because it was a lot warmer and wetter in the Eocene epoch.
Won't it get much warmer and wetter once global warming hits, allowing the rainforest to grow back?
Not necessarily, (or even according to climate models I’ve seen). The feedback the OP mentioned is because trees near the coasts catch rain that they then respirate back up and create an atmospheric river that moves inland and falls as rain thus continuing the cycle inward. This cycle is disrupted by deforestation and can stop during a state change where it turns into Savannah. Savannah's are much drier and don’t cycle through water like the rain forest would. We’ll also see abrupt changes in global climate which will lead to completely different global rainfall patterns than we know today. For example the Sahara desert will likely turn into grassland/forest (which has happened in the past). The rainforest being a holdover from the Eocene is news to me, but my understanding was that the climate of the Holocene that we are leaving had weather patterns that facilitated a positive feedback with the Amazon rainforest expansion. From my understanding a thriving Amazon also necessarily depended on a desert Sahara as they drive weather/nutrient patterns that helps the Amazon
Global warming will not reforest the planet with a substantially different biosphere to set the conditions for the Amazon to regrow and then persist.
I mean I suppose it could but contingent on that would be things like "thousands of years" and "likely substantial extinction of human population centers".
My understanding is very challenging for a few reasons.
1. A forest is not just a bunch of trees. It’s most healthy and robust with mature trees and right animal life that supports and propagates them
2. The short term economic incentives towards rehabilitating the forest aren’t there and are actively counter productive for soy and beef farming
3. It might already be past a tipping point as some parts of the forest are dying out and setting on fire through natural causes. The Amazon rainforest is NOT an ecosystem that is used to burning and it cannot recover from it since it destroys the ground cover and soils rainforest plants depend on to grow. Plants that like wet conditions need wet conditions to prosper, dusty charred clay ain’t that
And even if it's somehow possible, it takes a lot longer too. Unless you're just moving the trees from somewhere else (which kinda defeats the whole point), you need to grow new ones, and trees take a pretty long time to get as large as the ones we're talking about.
I was seeing a neurochiropractor for a concussion last year and she used one of those on-neck devices to lower my heartrate in-between rehab exercises. It worked very well in my experience.
I have tried to quit social media many times, but I end up using something again after a few weeks. It usually happens when I'm too tired to think about anything like games, or to read an article, or when I have a lot of waiting time without a lot of entertainment (eg airports). I wonder what do you do during those times?
I used to use Sublime Text around 8-10 years ago, but once VS Code became a thing, I switched to that, then to Zed last year. Inspired by this post, I decided to give ST another try. Here's how it went:
1. Installed ST via brew, all good so far. Let's open my hobby project written in Go.
2. Syntax highlighting works by default, great! But uh-oh, there's no autocomplete or any LSP. Alright, let's install one.
3. Hmm I need to install package control first - right I'm starting to remember now. I'm thinking it's strange how they are still two separate entities.
4. Ok, PC installed. Let's install a... ok Package Control crashed...
5. Copying the error from the debug console points me to a two-year-old forum post where the accepted solution is to either remove OpenSSL (?!) or install a beta PC version (outdated now) or try to uninstall Package Control and
reinstall it.
6. Ok, how do I uninstall Package Control? The documentation says they are just package files stored on my machine. It doesn't tell me where those files are, and I can't find a menu point to open the folder containing them...
My Kindle had this "bug" where my side loaded books randomly disappear. As a workaround, I have to keep it in flight mode at all times. Not a big issue since that’s what I would do anyway, but in case my Kindle would break, I wouldn’t think long to buy an alternative
This happend to my kindle to! After keeping in in flight mode for years I put it online again in order to buy a few new books from the kindle store, poof suddenly my entire library of side loaded books was gone, with progress and everything. I could see random metadata files related to the books on the drive, be books was gone. Super annoying as many of the books I didn't have locally anymore and to loose the "archivement" of finished books sucks big time.
I can see this may be implemented by amazon to counter piracy, but alot of these books was perfectly legal.
So the result of this is that I will never put my kindle online again and just stop buying from the Kindle store.
Keep mine in Aeroplane mode. Download books I buy on Amazon directly from amazon and drop them into calibre. Amazon doesn't get to touch my Kindle ever.
Thinking hard if I ever want to get another Kindle when Amazon can just screw around with what I put on my Kindle ...
Same, though I don't think it is going to help Amazon the way they hope it does. I moved books over to my kindle and had it nuke my humble bundle collections when I added a purchase from Amazon. I've not connect it again until I figure out how to backup and restore MY metadata.
This actually happened to me after connecting to wi-fi but there is a workaround that I found:
Convert your book to .azw3 in Calibre
Instead of sending it to the device in Calibre, locate the azw3 file (Right click -> Open book folder).
Copy the file to your Kindle, but not to the "documents" folder (where Calibre usually puts it) but rather into Downloads->Items
This folder is where books go when you buy them from Amazon or receive them after using the Send to Kindle feature. I have only tried this with azw3 so far but it might also work with .mobi format.
i'm not really sure what benefit you think they're gaining by breaking the less convenient, less user-friendly way to sideload books.
They're perfectly happy to let you email books to the kindle that you bought at other stores (or stole), as well as sync your progress with those books, backup those books to their servers, and generally have the full reading experience with all the benefits of the kindle ecosystem even if you didn't buy the book through kindle. If they didn't want to encourage the use of third-party files, surely they'd make it more difficult than a bug that randomly deletes books off some people's kindles sometimes.
The benefit (or potential gain) is that some people will just buy the book from the Kindle store to avoid the pain. I've seen that happen first-hand to my wife.
Also by emailing books or loading through their servers, they can still track and get that sweet sweet data/metadata that Amazon thrives on. When you sideload, you don't even have to connect it to the internet, which makes analytics more challenging.
You make an interesting point. Maybe facilitating the usage of sideloaded books is not among Amazon’s priorities. Yet I don’t know how much of that comes from malice rather than simply negligence or lack of interest.
It’s directly against their priority of influencing you to only purchase ebooks through their monopoly. Whether anti-competitive, anti-user practices are malicious or just a consequence of capitalism run wild, I don’t think there’s much of a difference
Out of all the devices where having a physical airplane mode switch would be nice, I'd put the kindle pretty high up. Kinda sucks having a battery that lasts ~45 days in airplane mode, and like a week and a half when I forget to turn it off.
Since the kindles with 3G have disappeared, the need for airplane mode for actual airplane use is a lot less though. Where I am most airlines permit WiFi use and even offer it themselves in flight. Only mobile network connections still have to be switched off.
Airplane mode is mostly a power-saving feature, because WiFi drains the battery pretty hard. As others said, leaving wifi on will kill your kindle in a week or so, whereas it can go on for months without it.
Physical switch is less prone to the whims of a capricious, resume-driven product owner who thinks their users may just want to get rid of airplane mode. Most are diving into firmware.
