What apple should do is automatically cross recompile the old apps to work on the new hardware. There are a lot of old apps that are excellent but will never get updated, a great many for small business, games and a huge inventory of educational applications. Nobody else will bother to write a replacement but cause the original creator was inspired and it is a small market in many cases. Yet, they are still great apps. Apple is doing this again on both iOS and MacOS. This same problem has happened before when Apple abandoned earlier MacOS versions. They are nearly a trillion dollar company. They could easily put forth the effort to bring the old apps, all the way back to the Lisa, onto the modern operating systems with recompiling. Shame on Apple for creating deadwood.
For those who think it's too hard a problem, you're wrong. I'm a programmer and have written both compilers and cross compilers. You don't need the source code. If you have the final program you can run it through a cross compiler, a just-in-time compiler or just emulate to run it on different hardware. That list is in order of efficiency and preference. This is not a hard task. Apple has done it before.
Apple should be interested in doing this is it adds value for their customers because the software you use today will run tomorrow and because it maximizes the Apple application ecosystem which Apple likes to crow about in their marketing materials, ads, etc.
With the extraordinary computing power of todays devices this is all very easy and even emulated software can run faster than it did on the original hardware.
Imagine a world where all your old books, music, photos and other documents are no longer accessible because Apple and other companies drop support.
It is time for two pieces of legislation:
1) If a company or an individual wants to release a program they must also accept that their copyright and patents end within two years of their stopping supporting the software. Same thing for hardware. In other words, shorten the protection time dramatically. This will make it so other people can pickup the product and support it if they want to as fans or as another vendor.
2) If a company is above a certain threshold, which should be very low, then they must also release the supporting documentations for source code, maintenance, etc so that other people can pick it up.
3) If a company is at the high level of Google, Microsoft, Sun, Apple and the like then they must continue to offer legacy support for a minimum of 50 years in addition to #1 and #2 above.
1) That would be a brilliant way to stifle innovation by turning everything a programmer or hardware designer creates into a big old millstone around their neck. Most two-year old apps and hardware will still work fine, even without any fiddling or updates. If failing to meet some indeterminate standard for "supporting" that thing means they'll lose all rights to it, then instead of spending resources to innovate new stuff, they'll be spending all their time "supporting" legacy stuff.
2) That's just insane. First, who's going to keep track of all that? There's a huge number of small-time and even amateur programmers out there who create apps and move on to other things in their lives. If somebody 20 years later wants the source code and supporting documentation for a 99-cent app somebody wrote once, who's going to find the author, and who's going to make that author go find their source code, if they even still have it somewhere?
What if they don't have it, or don't want to make the effort to look for it? Do they get fined? Do they go to jail?
Who is going to want to try their hand at programming or creating anything if doing so saddles them with what amounts to a lifetime obligation to support it or keep records and files?
3) That's even more insane. The Apple I was created 41 years ago, and discontinued a year later, by a two-guys-in-a-garage company. How is it reasonable to expect them to be responsible to "support" that machine? Ford is an enormous company, but they have no responsibility to continue making parts for and trouble-shooting any problems you might be having with your 1973 Pinto.
A critical part of both human growth and technological innovation is a willingness to make a clean break with the old in order to focus on the new. Saddling innovators with an automatic 50-year responsibility to fully support everything they create is a good way to kill off innovation. For any company that is less than 50 years old, your "law" would require them to intentionally commit less and less over time to creating new things, because they must commit more and more to supporting the old stuff. Using your vision for things, Apple would now mostly be a big repair shop, instead of a company creating innovative new tech. (Except they'd probably just go out of business, because that's just not a sustainable way to operate a company.)
Last edited: