this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
640 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
88014 readers
2754 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No way? Apple? OMG.. They'd never... Would they?
In case people haven't worked it out, Apple's business model has always been screw-everyone, to the point that they even sent out letters to other resellers customers (at a unrelated Apple reseller) to buy Applecare...
In fact, I would be surprised if they also weren't using the App store metrics to identify ideas/apps they should copy and target too (or, companies to buy).
If you spent money for that lovely premium computer hardware they sell, you only get updates for a few years, if you bought it at the end of the cycle.
If you remember Antennagate, Steve bent himself out of place to pretend their problem was the same as their competitors.
Multi-Touch phone. "Oh we patented that". They'd hate for their customers to mistake them for inventing multitouch. All those customers who came into our reseller who heard "macs can't get viruses" were just their own stupidity. Not misleading advertising
in a few exceptional cases around the very well known architecture transition that was announced in 2020. They will maintain older mac OSes that are intel compatible, so intel not completely unsupported.
Aside from that, Macs typically get many years of OS updates.
Apple only updates their computers for about 6-7 years. After that, no new MacOS updates. Architecture changes are unrelated, but, yes, they did that twice in the past 20 years (Microsoft and Linux both support mostly the same architectures they always did, with the itanium builds, or other funky architectures that never succeeded).
In contrast, even Microsoft only JUST broke backwards compatibility with old processors (and, have only done it once).. And I'm not even sure that's a hard cut off (as, I've seen older CPU's than 7XXX series with windows 11 being sold)
Apple profits on both the OS, and the hardware directly. They're in full control, and it isn't as though they need to support a RANGE of hardware. And they charge a premium for this hardware.
As BJW mentioned, even worse, developers hoping to develop for Mac OS or IOS NEED to buy an Apple computer to ensure compatibility with the latest builds. Microsoft doesn't force you to buy a Surface if you want to develop for them. On Linux, you don't need a specific system either
with windows 11 it depends a bit, there's cpus you were able to install win11 with some workarounds but that due to missing cpu instruction sets can't run newer builds
so the latest win11 major update running on a machine below official system requirements is no guarantee of the next one doing so as well