[speed_spread]

That's not just a dark pattern, it's the logical conclusion to Apple's entire business model. It's what you get for relying on the proprietary OS supplied by a hardware manufacturer. It's why Asahi Linux is so important.

[Narishma]

I'm not sure I agree. Open source software also regularly drops support for old hardware and OSes.

[em3rgent0rdr]

"regularly" is doing a lot of work here. When Linux drops hardware support, we are talking about ancient hardware. An example of a regular drop: Linux 6.15 just a month ago dropped support for 486 (from 1989)!

[cout]

That's surprising. What is the 486 missing that Linux needs? Or is it that there are no volunteers to test and maintain Linux on a 486 (as often happens with older architectures)?

[detaro]

It needs a bunch of compatibility code and the maintainers felt it wasn't worth the effort of taking care of that anymore:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250425084216.3913608-1-mingo@...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wicfBCyMj_x5BiL32o55jqXfn...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wjCiEk-kc-vOug2GKJdhHKce3...

[SlowTao]

Pretty much, you can still get modern distros that support 32bit PowerPC.

[teddyh]

Open source software drops hardware support only when there are nobody left who volunteers to support that hardware. When does this happen? It happens when there are not enough users left of that hardware.

As long as there are enough users of some hardware, free software will support it, because the users of that hardware want it to.

[skeeter2020]

Is "regularly" every 2-4 years, or longer? What are your options? With Apple you have none. It's really not a comparable situation.

[scarface_74]

And then he still couldn’t use the third party software he says he depends on…