Scoping The New Apple’s Planned Obsolescence Philosophy – The ‘Book Mystique

I’ve been thinking a lot about planned obsolescence lately. One of the aspects that’s always appealed to me about Apple hardware is its longevity. My inclination in general is to buy things I like and keep them for a long time. For example, we bought our 1990 Toyota Camry in 1998, and it’s still my wife’s daily driver. My winter ride is a 1994 Mazda B4000 4×4 pickup that I’ve owned for years.

I still have in daily production service two PowerBook G3 2000 “Pismo” laptops, which have been upgraded with G4 processors, RAM maxed out, and 8x SuperDrive optical drives, that are still in fine fettle — that legendary Mac reliability I’m referring to. I also have a Core 2 Duo unibody MacBook, now pushing three trouble-free years old, but the ancient Pismos — I’m drafting this column on one of them right now, remain among the most pleasant-to-use computers I’ve had the privilege of encountering, which is a big reason why I keep using them. Backwards compatibility is a huge issue for me.

My partiality for long-term amortization of expenditure on computer hardware makes Apple’s evident new philosophical embrace of planned obsolescence troubling. A prima facie example is Cupertino’s arbitrary under-the-bus-throwing of any Mac or iOS device user unable to or disinclined to upgrade their software, and if necessary their hardware, to run OS X 10.7 Lion and iOS 5 in order to access iCloud.

Now, speaking personally, being shut out of iCloud on my Macs (I do have iOS 5 installed on my iPad 2) is no major tragedy, at least at this point. I’m likely never going to be a thoroughgoing Cloud computing aficionado, another point where I’m philosophically at odds with the new Apple. I vigorously resist the push to become Cloud dependent, effectively turning my computers into dumb clients. I have Dropbox and Box.net accounts, and mostly use Gmail for email, and I trust all of them more than I do Apple to not shut me out some time in the possibly not-too-distant future with arbitrary obsolescence. For example, Dropbox works great with my old Pismo PowerBooks running OS X 10.4 Tiger as well as my Snow Leopard machine and my iPad.

In his recent commentary entitled “OS X Lion Sandboxing Is A Killjoy Destined To Ruin Our Mac Experience,” Cut of Mac’s David W. Martin summed what up well what obtains in this context thusly:

“I don’t know about you, but I’m not interested in owning a dumb computer or one-trick-pony apps. I’d prefer the freedom to build or use the apps I’ve known and loved for years versus an app that is watered down, locked down, and ultimately controlled by Apple. I know security is important, but I’d rather be free to use or build the apps the way I want.”

Let me second that.

TidBits’ Adam C. Engst commented recently that it’s long been conventional wisdom among the Mac faithful that while Macs may cost more than equivalent Windows-based PCs, the payback has been that, along with many other advantages, Macs retained their utility longer. Engst says he himself is a longtime low end Mac user, persevering with elderly machines long past what even many traditional Mac users would consider their “best before” dates. My old Pismos of course fall into that category as well.

However, Engst observes that hardware longevity notwithstanding, how long hardware continues to function using the software of its era is being undermined by the need to maintain software compatibility, particularly with networked software. He notes that for many years, an elderly Mac could remain useful even after being overtaken by new and incompatible system updates because computers in the PC era were relatively isolated from one another. Consequently, for as long as long as file formats remained compatible, older machines could maintain their utility. That’s changed as we’ve all gradually been lured into the Cloud. Web browsers were the first bellwether of this phenomenon, with their need for constant updates to sustain ability to to load Websites using the latest Web design techniques, as well as new and evolving security issues. Browser support, or rather lack of it, will probably be what ends this old PowerBook’s useful service life as a production machine. For now it’s been given a new lease on life by the excellent PowerPC-optimized TenFourFox port of Firefox 7, but one assumes that Firefox’s Gecko browser engine will eventually be revised to an extent that PowerPC porting becomes impractical.

Adam Engst suggests that Web browser compatibility is small potatoes compared to the compatibility issues Apple has raised with iCloud, which works only with Mac OS X 10.7.2 Lion and iOS 5. Suddenly, older Macs and iOS devices that aren’t compatible with Lion and iOS 5 have been (arbitrarily one infers) excluded from life in Apple’s version of the Cloud, regardless of how well they work with other Cloud services (eg: Dropbox’s support of OS 10.4), run other software and even modern Web browsers. In short, the effective life of Mac and iOS device hardware is now determined by Apple’s corporate fiat, rather than organically as the Macintosh industry gradually shifts away from supporting older machines.

That new reality inspired Engst to do some analysis of which Macs were made obsolete by subsequent versions of Mac OS X, in order to get a bead on the range of time in which you could purchase a Macintosh or iOS device, from the first model that qualifies for an operating system upgrade past the one with which it shipped up until the last moment a new model is for sale thats hit its limit, beginning with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, which was released in April 2005 and supported all PowerPC G3, G4, and G5-based Macs, as well as being the first Mac OS X version to run Intel-based Macs.

Makes for interesting reading, and reveals that a Mac computer’s once relatively expansive full-compatibility service life range has diminished to as little as three to four years — five at the outside, and as little as a depressing 15 or 16 months for some iOS devices, with maybe two to three years of support from Apple over the interval following purchase of a new Mac to immediately before you’re cast by the wayside. For example, Engst expects the A5 powered iPad 2 and iPhone 4S to both get thrown under the bus by iOS 7, probably less than two years hence. And iCloud is expected to accelerate the obsolescence process, with Apple able to goose its revenue stream at will by arbitrarily declaring obsolete entire generations of devices with networked services that support only on the most recent hardware and operating system versions.

Needless to say, as a Mac PC era traditionalist and reluctant sojourner in the post-PC era, I’m neither enchanted nor amused by these developments, and I’m left, for the first time in nearly 20 years of Mac-usership, seriously pondering the possibility of leaving the Apple fold. Currently I’m at the point in my targeted computer system upgrade cycle where I would be anticipating purchase of a new Mac sometime in the next few months. Now I’m not so certain. My acquisition of an iPad 2 five months ago is also a complicating factor in my deliberations. I had originally hoped that the iPad purchase would possibly forestall the necessity of replacing my late 2008 model (purchased in March, 2009) Core 2 Duo unibody MacBook for a year. Regrettably, the iPad turned out to be a disappointment as a laptop substitute, although iOS 5 and a great new iOS text-crunching application for writers called TextKraft have improved the ‘Pad’s utility as a production platform somewhat.

I’m pretty much resolved that OS X 10.7 Snow Leopard will be the ultimate OS upgrade for the 2.0 GHz C2D MacBook, so moving to Lion for me will mean purchasing at least one more Mac, and that I will probably do, but I’m still undecided, and may postpone any further moves until the significance of iCloud in the future of computing on the Mac platform becomes clearer.

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