[Bud]

No, it does not look like "forced obsolescence", and could we please stop with this silly narrative every single time there is any kind of Apple bug?

It gets nobody anywhere, it's contradicted by a 20-year period of generally very reliable and long-lasting hardware from Apple, and additionally, it's lazy and uninformative.

[hungryforcodes]

Remember when they took a year off to basically rewrite and optimize Mac OS after 10.5? And they produced a wonderful OS that I’m sure people still have very fond memories of. It didn’t have a lot of new features, compared to 10.5. Steve Jobs even said that publicly a number of times, during that year. He said — and I’m paraphrasing — “that we will work on PERFORMANCE.” All my Macs since 1998 have suffered slow downs on Mac OS updates after say 10.6. 10.6 was the pinnacle of performance.

Every upgrade since 10.10 has had a NOTICEABLE slow down on my MacBook Air 2013, and my 2012 Mac Mini, and more recently my MBP 2017 is showing signs of slow down and reduced battery life as well with each update. They can even be point updates, not major ones.

These happen man, and I can’t see the real benefits that I’ve gotten from say 10.10 -> 10.15 that would outvalue the degradation in performance I’ve seen. Ok you say, a MBA 2013 is ready for the pasture, but a maxed out (RAM, SSD) MBP that is 3 years old is really just entering midlife.

It’s not a random mistake.

[gpm]

The 20 year period in which Apple has paid out hundreds of millions in dollars in settlements for illegally forcing obsolence of old devices, e.g. this one [1] that was settled in March of this year and this fine from France [2] in February of this year?

History is not on Apple's side here.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/technology/apple-iphone-l...

[2] https://fortune.com/2020/02/07/apple-iphone-slowdown-update-...

[acdha]

You might want to actually read those links: the issue was battery lifetime where Apple made the devices slow down when the battery could no longer meet peak demand rather than crashing. Lithium ion batteries are always going to degrade so it’s only forced obsolescence if you think Apple is sitting on some game-changing battery technology which doesn’t degrade over time.

[Bud]

Indeed, what this case actually showed, to people who are paying attention rather than looking for bogus reasons to accuse Apple of things, is that Apple was more committed to keeping older devices running longer. Not less.

That's the opposite of "forced obsolescence". And it's not even a close call. The stupid, credulous media coverage of this issue was embarrassing.

[DonaldPShimoda]

It's so frustrating that people immediately jump for "forced/planned obsolescence" whenever something like this happens.

Forced obsolescence is the deliberate undermining of a device to ensure that it cannot be used in the future. That would be if Apple intentionally included code in Big Sur to cause older MacBooks to mysteriously brick.

There is a big difference between intentionally writing code like this versus not performing adequate Q&A to ensure that such bug doesn't exist, and only the former of these qualifies as planned obsolescence.