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Comment by hs86 | Hacker News Reader

I don't trust them. Apple's privacy efforts might be admirable, but I don't trust them to deliver a reliable service in the long run, especially on platforms that aren't their own or in platforms they declared as deprecated.

For example, most parts of iCloud are missing on Android, and their iCloud client for Windows has been broken for months or even years. Its log complains about launching iCloudDrive-AppX.exe while the install directory doesn't contain any executables with a "-AppX.exe" suffix. So no file syncing for me on Windows, I guess.

Having client site updates tied to major macOS/iOS releases is also sometimes causing strange issues if I still want to use older versions of macOS and iOS.

The happy path is only using devices from Apple and always staying on their latest OS release. No idea how attractive this new feature is for people who already use custom domains because they don't want to be tied to a single provider.

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> Apple’s privacy practices might be admirable

This is an understatement. The company continues to set the bar for security and data privacy across the entire stack.

RE staying within recent OS and devices for a happy path, I’m already fully on board with this. I update iPhone every year and my oldest machine is a 2018 MBA.

I think Apple does a better job supporting older equipment than other companies, and deprecates mostly to make valuable pushes forward.

I might have agreed with you 5 years ago, but when Apple dropped support for 32-bit apps (and later x86 altogether) I had to switch over to Linux.

If they were a little more considerate towards their power-users and developers, I could probably loop a Mac in for ~60% of my daily workflow. Nowadays though, I'd rather just use an OS that lets me do 95% of the stuff I do without compromise.

> dropped support for 32-bit apps and x86

Just this past week:

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/30/os-x-lion-mountain-lion...

From the article:

Apple has kept OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion available for customers who have machines limited to the older software, but until recently, Apple was charging $19.99 to get download codes for the updates.

As of last week, these updates no longer require a fee, and can be downloaded from the OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion support documents on Apple's website.

Mac OS X Lion is compatible with Macs that have an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor, a minimum of 2GB RAM, and 7GB storage space.

Mac OS X Mountain Lion is compatible with the following Macs:

    iMac (Mid 2007-2020)
    MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
    MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
    MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
    Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
    Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
    Xserve (Early 2009)

How much older do power-users and developers need?

I don't want to run Lion or Mountain Lion though. Mojave was a mostly fine OS, I would rather they make it an LTS release or offer 32-bit support going forwards, but that seems to be fundamentally incompatible with their new target audience. Ultimately I'm not that irked since a switch to Linux was long overdue for me, but it gets under my skin watching Apple continue to ruin an OS that used to work fine for me.

Considering that the 64 bit transition work started with what, Mac OS X Snow Leopard released in 2009, the writing has been on the wall for a pretty long time that 32 bit isn’t the future. That Apple supported 32 bit apps through macOS Mojave (which still gets security updates) is really something for that company.

To be fair they’ve handled email for decades so if the service really sucked we’d have plenty of reports by now. I think overall we’re past the poor experience offered by early cloud offerings by Apple. Hopefully.

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