You can get support for mac/etc stuff for 5 years after purchase (which admittedly is nice). However, before you decide that is awesome, things like the headphones were killed with no support regardless of purchase date.
Apple also refuses to call anything it stopped manufacturing "canceled" at all.
It deliberately tries to message this part, calling them "vintage" until they have been "not manufactured" (IE canceled) for at least 7 years. They are then called "obsolete". This is messaging specifically used to try to confuse the issue, and is unfortunately likely effective.
See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624
Apple doesn't turn down a lot of open API's because they never have them in the first place, which i'm not sure is better.
(They do turn down existing closed APIs, and not uncommonly by force - saying if you want to put your app on the store, you must use new version of API x)
Monster and Beats ended their partnership in 2012, and Apple didn't acquire Beats till 2014.
Airport had a long run, and even when discontinued, Apple offered to service Airport products for five years.
Yes, Ping got the axe, and my heart goes out to both of Ping's active users.
"
Oh well, did you remove everything on the list that Google shut down post-acquisition? No? Okay then.
"Yes, Ping got the axe, and my heart goes out to both of Ping's active users."
Would you change your tune if you discovered the canceled google products had less users than Ping?
Google isn't cancelling majority-user products either. If the whole point is not to hurt the minority, you are just showing you aren't willing to apply the same standards.
This whole comment feels that way - a strong inability to apply the same standards to two companies.
I’m not criticizing Google or defending Apple. I’m just saying, your examples weren’t very convincing. If that’s the worst of Apple’s product cancellations (including one claim which wasn’t even true), that’s way better than average.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping
Edit: on a more serious note, what if you loved PPC development? Apple went x86 and now you can’t develop there. It’s my main fear whenever there’s talk of them using their ARM cores for a new laptop and macOS.
To be clear, I think they pulled that transition off really well, and suspect they could do x86 => ARM better than anyone (closed ecosystem, tons of LLVM people). It would still mean they were deprecating and cancelling x86 though (presumably with a Rosetta-like translator for a while).
I felt Gmail was at _significant_ risk when Inbox was announced; result was unexpected.
Understanding that underlying infra, when you go deep enough, may have been shared between Gmail & Inbox, same is much the case for all email services anywhere; it IS the front-end UI, and featured enabled by it, that by and large makes an email product.
Marketing at the time seemed to indicate and place Inbox as a separate product, and more than one note from Google hinted that it would replace Gmail. In hindsight it obviously didn't happen, but many of us thought it presented a significant risk to Gmail; just as recently people were looking for "Inbox alternatives" due to its demise, at the time we were searching for "Gmail alternatives" due to potential replacement by Inbox (which I think was a brilliant idea and potentially implementation - but I'm too much of a control freak to utilize:).
In the end we are all humans even companies like Apple are run by humans.
This is similar to running a wireless network for yourself vs your non-tech family members. For family members, it is easy to just get Google Wifi/Eero, and have good wifi through the home. For your own home, you _may_ consider running OpenWRT, and creating a bunch of VLANs, etc.