Itunes 10 and Tiger 10.4.11 - pay Apple again to use products you already own | Hacker News Reader

Itunes 10 and Tiger 10.4.11 - pay Apple again to use products you already own

discussions.apple.com

5 pointshoodoof6 comments

I hear it doesn't work on 68K-based Macs, either. :-)

Seriously, Apple hasn't even made a PPC machine in what, nearly 5 years? It's great when manufacturers support legacy hardware, but at some point you're going to have to bite the bullet and upgrade. It's not like there hasn't been plenty of warning.

Except that the upgrade is required for a new piece of hardware and the original requirements description was incorrect. How many people buy ipods / iphones as a present and have no idea what software someone is running apart from "it's apple"? How many people read the requirements for hardware at the shop and remember their precise software version number? How many know what version numbers are?

That change simply fails the "grandma test" in every possible way. Sales not being able to provide correct information about upgrade possibilities doesn't help (see posts about difficulty to obtain upgrades).

It's not a PPC issue, as they're still supported up to Leopard. It's iTunes not working with Tiger that is causing the forced, paid, upgrade.

Person doesn't read back of box that details prerequisites for compatibility, then complains when their software is too old to work with new hardware.

Excuse given is that even older versions of Microsoft software is compatible. The problem with the argument that "Apple should just give them an upgrade to be compatible" is what do you do with all the people who have XP-era versions of OS X that are incompatible (this is 10.1-10.3 roughly)? Buy them new computer hardware?

Seriously, people not upgrading then having problems = not a problem for company selling commercial software.

Also, where's the outrage at Adobe releasing new versions of Creative Suite that are backwards compatible with old versions of OS X?

ITunes 10 is an absolute monstrosity. I'm not at all surprised you need every bit of Leopard and its requirements to handle that mess. What Apple should have done is whip up a tiny little iutil to use theses new devices(1) in a reduced capacity with gentle pressure to upgrade.

Just telling your customers that they're SOL doesn't seem like it fits the "Just Works" philosophy to me.

(1) The iphone4, new iPod touch, etc all require iTunes 10. This is the primary reason people are trying to upgrade. There are a huge number of "Tigers" out there who are just now discovering the need to upgrade and are confused about how to do it.

This contributed to me "switching" to an Android phone, rather than upgrading to an iPhone 4. I had an iPhone 3G (not the GS), that recently came out of contract (purchased 9/2009). The phone was working fine for me, I had no reason to upgrade, other than the fact that the phone was much slower since the introduction of iOS 4. Apple's latest iOS release no longer supports the 3G; abandoning hardware this close to release doesn't really sit well with me, especially since an AppleCare support contract extends out to three years.

Then the GPS tracking fiasco came about, since I couldn't figure out if the 3G was affected, and Apple refused to release a new release for 3G customers, even though this is a security-related issue, I became fed-up and got an HTC Inspire 4G (aka Desire HD) instead, and don't miss the iPhone at all. Maybe in two or three more years I'll come back to iPhone. Maybe not.

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