What a load of codswallop. If you actually knew anything about real software development you’d understand that “on purpose” and “planned obsolescence” is paranoid BS. There are genuine quality software development reasons for not maintaining support for old hardware.
Ever wonder why macOS is so much better, cleaner, more stable, etc than Windows? More than any other reason it’s because Apple doesn’t bend over backwards trying to make it run on every piece of hardware under the sun. Limiting the hardware each release runs on means they can purge it of old code and keep it clean and lean.
Windows is great how it supports so much more hardware including so much older hardware, but the resulting overall experience sucks in comparison because of the exact same reason.
(And if you don’t agree that macOS is better than Windows then what are you doing here in the first place? Surely not because of Apple’s tiny hardware selection.)
You can take off the tinfoil hat. Really.
macOS is so much better, cleaner, more stable than Windows? Which year did you get in a coma and only woke up today, and didn’t get to use a Mac yet? 2010? Any software made by Apple is **** now, sorry no one told you. Just wait until you hear about the butterfly keyboards too...
Yeah, funny that they would develop a feature that’s most needed by older users (that’s the batteries that, if not tended to properly, will fail after a short while), yet only bothered to test on newer hardware. Surely they’re not trying to make people think “well if I buy another battery for this 2015 Mac that’s working perfectly fine (other than the battery), I will have to buy another battery pretty soon, so I might as well open up the wallet and buy new hardware where the battery lasts longer.”
Also, I know for a fact that the commands sent to the battery to stop charging exist on a 1998 standard. If the battery adheres to that standard (and Apple’s do, they did since my first 17” first or second-gen MacBook Pro), it should be a piece of cake to implement. They already have to do Q&A for the whole OS on that hardware, so why not add a tiny little extra workload to test the one feature that would actually be useful for users with older computers? Surely they’re not more excited about whatever new Emoji set Apple added to the OS in the latest update?
The funny part is that the core of the Al Dente could be written in a few dozen lines: it just writes a byte to one SMC key. The Q&A is all the hardware itself, which presumably has been done already.
To conclude: if Apple really won’t do this because of the extra Q&A workload, but does care about its users, why not release documentation on this SMC key so people could write unsupported software that does the same thing?
github.com
