[onion2k]

A company thinks everyone should be using the latest of their products. Oh no.

An alternative way to read this is that Apple themselves don't believe their own products will be worth using after 5 years, and will therefore fail to support them properly in the long term. Anyone in the market for a computer to last longer than that (eg most home users, and many corporate users who don't lease) might have to look elsewhere.

This is not an offhand throwaway comment. This speaks to the absolute heart of Apple's strategy.

[andremendes]

>Apple themselves don't believe their own products will be worth using after 5 years

I think you got the gist of this thread! It's not actually about the poor but about competing products lasting longer than their product planned lifespan, and that's a bad thing for them.

[r00fus]

> An alternative way to read this is that Apple themselves don't believe their own products will be worth using after 5 years

My late 2008 Aluminum Macbook is still supported on their current OS (El Capitan). That's a 7.5 year old device. This is par for the course for Apple.

The current iOS supports iPad2's - a 5+ year old device.

[bluthru]

>An alternative way to read this is that Apple themselves don't believe their own products will be worth using after 5 years

Didn't he say Windows PC's?

Also OS X supports Core2Duo hardware, which is nearly 10 years old.

[ams6110]

Apple makes no money on the OS. That is included with the hardware and upgrades are free. So aside from services such as App Store and iTunes, Apple has to sell hardware to make money. It's not in their interest to encourage people to hang on to older hardware as long as possible.

[onion2k]

It's not in their interest to encourage people to hang on to older hardware as long as possible.

There's a difference between encouraging people to hang on to hardware for as long as possible and actively driving away your customers by laughing at them or suggesting that your own products will be obsolete before the customer is ready to update again.

To maximise their profit on hardware Apple should be encouraging users to stay within the Apple ecosystem, even if those customers only upgrade every 10 years. This is especially true in today's climate of very powerful computers that will easily do most things a home user wants to do even after a decade. As someone who writes web software I am acutely aware that there are users who are still using old PCs with old software.

For Apple to push their customers to abandon Apple products in favour of things that last longer is corporate suicide.