[nicholassmith]

Whilst Apple removing an application without informing the user is bad, them not shipping things that are less used is a good thing. RSS I'm sure had at least 10 users, but it was an unneeded overhead in two applications.

X11 on OS X has always been, well, not that great and I use it fairly regularly for remote session testing and a few other bits and bobs. Apple wants someone else to keep it up to date for the people who need it to download it? Fine. Lets go down that route.

Apple is as committed to the terminal as they've ever been, which is to say it'll be there as long as there's developers and 'power users' on the system. If they do decide no longer to ship a terminal? There'll be other packages to do it. They can't rip the UNIX underpinnings out overnight.

[gurkendoktor]

> RSS I'm sure had at least 10 users, but it was an unneeded overhead in two applications.

Exactly this is my issue (not the rest of your comment, but this sentiment which I see everywhere since a couple years or so). Every time Apple drops support for anything, people talk about cleaning up, or the inevitable march of progress, or about how Microsoft is doomed because you can still install their OS on unworthy 32-bit boxen.

RSS support in mail hardly imposed any overhead on users. Why do we care about what Apple's programmers think or feel? These folks are paid to keep their apps running. Maintaining Cocoa apps is something that Apple can easily hire more people for (unlike hacking on the kernel, or on system frameworks).

[nicholassmith]

It probably doesn't impose any overhead specifically on users, but it's additional codebase that needs to be maintained and whilst that's a 'well that sucks for the devs' issue it becomes a user issue as they're not focusing on their core competencies, which in this case is making the email client as good as possible. I'll take a better email app over additional, underused features.