VideoLAN @videolan App Stores were a mistake. Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users… For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when?
Name a company that gives security updates to 15 year old tablets.
I wish they did, but this is hardly just an Apple problem. The only reason I bring this up is because people very quickly dunk on Apple without thinking about the fact that we need more access to all of our hardware in order to increase the longevity for those who want to.
Frankly I find iPads work longer on average than most other tablets. Purely anecdotal though.
The other elephant in the room is that most people don’t want to use 15 yr old tablets. I know I don’t want to edit video on 15 yr old desktops, even though they were perfectly capable of editing 15 years ago. But not current videos. Just like 15 year old tablets will not be able to readily stream or display a lot of modern content correctly.
Why does it have to be a company?
Tons of old hardware continues to be useful to its owners just by virtue of being on open and maintainable platforms.
But Apple continues to push harder and harder for planned obsolescence while claiming they support their devices better than the competition.
Apple earns unique hate in this category because of how strenuously they fight against things like right to repair. Failing to support old products isn’t the end of the world but intentionally making it so that old products aren’t supportable is very bad and the Apple App Store is a major instrument for making sure old Apple devices stop being useful.
apple does ‘support’ their hw better, it’s just that it’s a pretty low bar to start with these days. they and their competitors could do better–much better, but zomg! someone has to think of the shareholders. they’re far more important than users or the planet.
Apple innovates in new and exciting ways to not support devices. They invent new antirepair technologies and have pioneered locked-in walled-garden app stores that prohibit users from doing what they want or need to keep their devices working.
They don’t get to wear the white hat just because they do some shit well. They are the bad guy. And they could change posture pretty much immediately if they were at ALL serious about their devices having long-term support. They control basically their whole tech stack and could make it so their devices can continue to be maintained indefinitely even if they aren’t doing it. But control matters more to them than support.
I really don’t think anyone should be giving them credit here, not even as a backhanded compliment.
i do edit photos and video on a 15 year old desktop. yea, it’s not as fast. it even still only has mechanical hdd. it works. i really don’t give a shit how long it takes to encode. it can sw encode hd h264 in ‘real time’ (sw giving better quality output and at a smaller file size than the faster gpu encoding), that’s good enough for me. it does everything the much newer system i’ve been able to use recently at the office can do–it’s just slower at some things.
My 2007-era desktop was perfectly capable as an HD video editor and streaming server. Anything worth a shit in the Desktop space since round-about 2010 has been decent at on-the-fly transcoding as well.
Your incredulity is astounding to me. The Xbox 360 and PS3 were both perfectly capable as streaming players, way back in 2006. The PC’s of that era were more powerful, not less, and avoiding emulation or discrete gpus are some of the main reasons those consoles used PowerPC. They wanted a more compact solution
So the ending to the story which i didnt feel like typing out earlier was that i loaded debian on to the macbook and it runs 2x faster now with regular security updates…
The vast majority of people will never edit a video. The vast majority would be perfectly happy doing 90% of their work in a browser on older hardware instead of chucking it in the bin
My iPad2 can’t do internet anymore, or for instance used as a panel for home assistant webpage or client, but it’s perfectly fine as a homestudio controller and music / midi generator and that is what I still use it for. Battery is still great too. I got it about 13 years ago and I will be using it until it stops working. Looks as good as new too.
I do have a recent iPad too, it’s for all the stuff I cannot do on the old one.
