[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35337611

Unfortunately which posts get traction is very much a game of luck on HN. Some good samaritans have to hang out on the 'New' page and upvote interesting stories for them to have a chance to come on the front page. Once on the front page, the interesting stories get voted rapidly but coming to the front page itself is 90% of the battle.

I like the Lobsters model here where every new post remains on the front page for sometime and then drops off if it does not get enough votes. Due to the volume of posts HN receives, naturally such a system won't work here! So it is all down to the good samaritans hanging out on the New tab.

I'm not sure what your gripe is here specifically, if you want to continue to run steam, you can upgrade your OS once a decade, or you can install steam for Linux if your device doesn't meet the requirements. That's about as good a set of options as I could imagine.

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-syste...

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-7-system...

it's not unreasonable until you realize that Valve offers no other method for audiences that may be stuck with older machines to play the games that they purchased, which at the time of purchase they had completely met all of the system requirements.

A basic game should not have a set of rolling requirements that are ever-increasing. Valve decided that they wanted to hold the keys to the kingdom with regards to the games that they sold; thus it's a bit more unreasonable when they decide to nix a part of the audience without any recourse available to them other than "download what you need now, and unplug.".

Leisure Suit Larry required a 286 and CGA graphics -- isn't it a bit ridiculous that a Steam purchased 'Leisure Suit Larry' is going to soon require an OS greater than Windows 8.1? Yeah; I get that it's only by virtue of requiring their portal to download the thing , but they offer no alternative to this .

1. https://www.protondb.com/search?q=Leisure%20Suit%20Larry

2. https://boilingsteam.com/75-of-the-top-100-most-played-games...

At any rate, most of these users would be far better off moving to a linux distro than staying on a decaying OS, that's how I've kept most of my old laptops and such alive.

They do - update to windows 10, for free, or install Ubuntu.

> A basic game should not have a set of rolling requirements that are ever-increasing.

They don't, but the platform that delivers those games can.

I don't see anything reasonable in turning perfectly good hardware into e-waste. I don't expect anybody to put effort into continued support for old stuff, but I do expect them to not break stuff that used to work. With Valve/Steam specifically you also run into paradoxical situations where they sell you old games on Steam, but those old games only run on old Windows version on which Steam itself does no longer runs.

That said, Valve is among the least problematic offender here, they put a ton of effort into Linux support for Windows games, they allow developers to keep selected older versions of games available and they have forums that make it easy to find workarounds. So most of the time, there is some way to get things to work, even if it's a bit more labor intensive than it should be.

But generally speaking, the whole software industry needs to get their shit together and figure out how to keep old stuff around and working. If I buy something digital, it should be available for as long as the company that sold to me exists. That's really not too much to expect. It's embarrassing how billion dollar companies are unable to just move their digital goods into a permanent archive once they lost interest in actively working on it.

Nobody's doing that. There's a free upgrade from both Windows 7 and Windows 8 to Windows 10, and the hardware specs from MS are the same for all three OS's. For anyone who doesn't want to install Windows 10 on their devices, Steam is officially supported on Ubuntu. If you want to continue to play games on your windows 7 device, you have the option to download those games right now, and archive them in whatever way you see fit to continue to play them on your device.

> If I buy something digital, it should be available for as long as the company that sold to me exists.

Hard disagree here. You spending $20 on something doesn't entitle you to a perpetual access to a version of something under your terms. You have the option to access the game still on your hardware.

My experience with the iOS App Store has been that if you only just now heard of the app and your phone's too old, you can't even download the version that works for your phone. And that is what ends up forcing an upgrade for many people.

The effect may be indirect - someone in a poor country with a 6 year old iDevice finds it becomes unusable, so they want to buy a 3 year old iDevice... And they're buying that from someone who has a 3 year old iDevice who sees that for not a lot of extra money they can buy the newest one.

We have a Ring with the app installed on an old phone that we use as the "household" phone. I was going to "upgrade" the household phone to be an old tablet which while newer and running a later version of Android, is still old. Can't install the Ring app on the newer tablet because it is too old. So we are stuck with the even older phone unless we buy something new.

Of course it's a viable solution only for an archivist/advanced users, not so for common users who just wish to keep their old device running smoothly.

The fact that "it still works" isn't the only consideration though - it's the security posture. There's plenty of remotely-exploitable flaws in that software stack from 2013.

Well running unpatched stuff is no longer like that. I bet you could use a 2013 iDevice for a whole year and not get exploited once.

Exploits are mostly against the rich and famous now, and not so much against regular joe.

Was that actually true, or just an urban legend? I've heard this a lot back then, but never actually saw it happen.

Also, some ISP's blocked ports which protected you somewhat.

It was certainly quick enough that there was no way to get the updates installed before the machine would bluescreen (many of these exploiters didn't care much for the stability of your machine...)

Not a big threat downstream.

Nowadays, most security features and upgrades are designed to protect the device against its owner.

I also used my Samsung S2 way beyond reasonable terms, think maybe 6 years I have used that one and it was still perfectly usable when I switched to iPhone. It's my festival phone now.

Every one I personally owned since that was either janky or pulled some stupid tricks on system updates or something.

This mentality is one of the reasons why there's only such much people with older phones.

> If you want to continue to use older hardware, just accept that you also have to use older software.

I don't think we should accept that easily, because after all there are physical (somewhat finite) resources and external costs such as green house gas emissions involved when new hardware gets produced.

Also, sometimes you don't have the choice. The app for the public transportation in my city is quite heavy but there is no alternatives except queuing for a paper tickets. And I would bet that most users would be absolutely fine with a leaner/faster app.

So sure, you have to keep up with the time but to me, it feels more and more like a wasteful flight forward anyway.

Twitter doesn't work. Their app now shows _maybe_ 5% of tweets that my logged in user does. Safari is slow as crap on the website.

Google voice still rings and shows notifications, but can't function because no updates are available and something in the api is broken.

A non-zero number of sites show no-css warnings or just crash because it's an old JS interpreter. (HN though -- it's still rocking the 2000 era web design)

Apps that access the network are slowly dying. Though kindle and mail still work, and that's about all I use it for now.

This was a $300 device 8 years ago, and probably has my best $/usage of any tech I've ever had. The replacement is an 800eur ipad, because it's now effectively a pro model rather than the cheap one, and I'm not sure I can justify that.

There’s a lot to be said about software longevity but the gains made by Apple’s newer CPU/SOCs is really impressive and noticeable day-to-day.

I find this hard to believe. A $300 iPad mini 2 from 2015 is comparable in specs to an 800 Euro 2023 iPad Pro?

Edit: Actually, you can compare them directly on Apple’s website:

https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?modelList=ipad-mini-2,ip...

Even the current iPad mini (6th gen) blows the iPad mini 2 out of the water.

https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?modelList=ipad-mini-2,ip...

Mini 6 has regularly been on sale for $499 as well since it is now long in the tooth already.

If I want a mini with cell, it's 800 eur, which might be 600 moneys where you live, but VAT is included here.

Actually, 64GB mini with Wifi+Cellular is 869 eur in Ireland, just checked there. When I bought my original mini, it was the cheapest new iOS device with a cell radio.

Still have the invoice.

>Introductory price

>Wi-Fi: 16 GB: $399, 32 GB: $499, 64 GB: $599, 128 GB: $699

>Wi-Fi + Cellular: 16 GB: $529, 32 GB: $629, 64 GB: $729, 128 GB: $829

I have a Jan 7, 2015 receipt from Apple for a 16GB Wifi only iPad mini for $300, and that was for the first version of iPad mini.

Perhaps you bought it with a special promotional price.

You don't?

I can run VsCode on my laptop from 2005. I dont have anything older, but Debian does run on servers from 2005, and can probably run VsCode

Sure, mobile phones changes a lot between 2005 and 2015.

But in the past 5 years there hasn't been much progress

This sits with OS first and foremost, and we do this shit because we can get away with it.

We will have to change, this isnt sustainable

we didn’t even have multicore processing in 1996. 1995-2005 looks very different from 2005-2015.

We had a bunch of DECpc XL dual Pentiums a few years before that too.

I'm pretty sure it was on nt3.51 at that stage with exceed for remote X windows apps and a bunch of bespoke win32 stuff.

Also you’d want to avoid loading too many plugins all at once, due to limited RAM, but that should be obvious as well.

Nope - AppStore showed about 12 results for "interval timer", but none of them were installable on iOS 6. I thought then I will look for an online interval timer, and use it through wifi. After clicking through the first 3 pages of Google results, Safari could not make any of the pages usable. Either loaded a blank screen, or the interface didn't react to the touches - I guess some "fancy" new features that are too modern for the old Safari.

I could rant about loading 10MB JS on a typical lightweight site that has the same visuals and functionality as 15 years ago, but now it makes Chrome cry on a modern machine... but I won't do that.

Anyway this is how I gave up having an interval timer on my iPod. Maybe my plan was too grandiose to begin with. Neither new software, nor old software.

It could definitely do more than what it currently can, but I don’t think it is reasonable to expect such a long support period, especially that mobile hardware underwent a complete metamorphosis in the meanwhile.

It is reasonable to expect an iphone 14 to be usable as a general purpose device until the next major breakthrough, because year-to-year upgrades are mostly incremental nowadays, but say the first iphone is incomparable on the hardware front to a modern smartphone.

Frankly, there hasn't been a revolutionary breakthrough in the field of interval timers' technical design in the past decade that would warrant such a ridiculous obsolescence. We are literally talking about "hello world" level applications, that can't run on the device - not because the hardware or software isn't capable.

At the same time, speaking beyond Apple, how long is too long to keep various code, infrastructure, etc around and supported?

Apple dropped support for 32-bit apps being published awhile back because they dropped 32-bit executable support from the OS. Should they keep the binaries around and available forever?

Eventually the old stuff becomes something you have to engineer around. And eventually that becomes too costly to justify.

Again, I agree with you, but businesses have to justify their spend [insert quippy VC jokes here].

I’d like to see a non-commercial approach to solve issues like this very broadly. For example you could legislate that device manufacturers over a certain size retain device software and firmware, and that it all be open sourced after a certain duration. If you go out of business, you transfer it to a trust setup to maintain access to such things. (I admit this is a simplistic example, but it’s not intended to be a full solution.)

(I do work on complex embedded operating systems, with decades long support contracts. We are far from Apple size, I must admit, but I do know what this work involves. Keeping the lights on for such systems is not such a huge expense as everyone pretends it to be. RPi4 is an exaggeration, but not a huge one.)

I don't expect new stuff to work on old systems, I'm not crazy.

I remember, many years ago, someone complained Steve Jobs via email about some iOS update, that he didn't like. And Steve's response was along the lines of "Does the system still do everything what it did when you bought it? Yes? Then have a nice day."

Apple does not give such responses anymore. They avoid answering these. With a reason.

But don't get me completely wrong. I bought my iPod 11 or 12 years ago (I don't even remember), and this is literally my oldest tech that I still use every day. This tells a lot. But my blood boils when I think about how much better it used to be, and how much better it could be... only if Apple wanted it to be.

For the App Store specifically, that very mentality works against keeping apps available. From Apple’s (or for that matter Google’s) perspective, a production App Store has the front end, sure. Also the CDN, the entitlements, DRM, and code signing, payments and IAPs, interfaces to developer tooling/upload/analytics, scanning for the use of private APIs, and so on.

To make such a system function more like FTP for old apps, they’d have to build that in or at least build paths that serve to exempt classes of apps from some or all of that.

I can absolutely understand why their perspective is that if they’re spending effort to remove or deprecate old apps or features, it would appear crazy to introduce new features or services simply to serve up the old. Even if they could do it at cost, that’s developer time at least, and “why spend that on old stuff?” Apple is the company that razed its own corporate museum under Jobs because he thought the past was irrelevant or would hold them back.

I would LOVE if they did that though. They see the dollar signs involved in preservation, not the value. Sadly, the day may come when App Stores share the fate if the game stores like the Wii U storefront, and entire generations of software will be lost.

that isn't supposed to be a herculean effort -- if it is then you should question those that provide the software stack, and question why you're beholden to those decision-makers.

Apple does not give you the freedom to use old versions of software. You can't downgrade your iOS version. You can only upgrade apps, and iOS only lets you download the latest available version of an app for your version of iOS.

Need to do a device reset? If you have managed to keep any apps on old versions, you'll get upgraded now. And you can't even save APKs and sideload because of Apple's developer signatured and certs.

Old versions of iOS get some, but certainly not all security updates.

And most importantly... so, so, so many apps, from banking to navigation to music, insist on checking your app version and blocking usage with a massive dialog box if you're a couple of weeks out of date. It's incredibly obnoxious, especially when some of these apps update 2-3 times a week and each update is >100MB. I try to use those services from a web browser these days, but Safari is so limiting you can't even reliably block ironic "download the app" banners.

And that's to say nothing of actual cellular advancements, like new LTE bands and 5G and voLTE, which older phones understandably can't get... but which certain phone providers use to kick old phones off the network. For instance, AT&T no longer allows any activations for phones not on their (very limited) voLTE whitelist, since they shut down 3G.

Like OP, really wish I could just use the 2016 SE for the next 10 years. But even though the hardware is capable the software industry has pushed it into the "legacy" bin.

The last thing they cannot take away and cannot control is offline physical goods, like books for example.

Not really. E.g. can download mp3 music and mp4 movies on my own HD and so far Microsoft Defender hasn't deleted them.

But to your point, even on a 1st gen iPad - at least the last time I tried a couple of years ago - you can still play music you bought from Apple using the Music app. As far as I know, iTunes still supports every iPod and iOS device ever made.

You can always download the app version that works for your phone using the Purchased section... the only real phone I have yet to be able to do this for is the iPhone 4 which did not have 64-bit apps.

My iPhone 5S and beyond all have access to every app that is available for 64-bit OS. It's often an older version of the app but that's kinda the Apple burden.

Older iOS versions have other problems as well. Safari is not an app that you can update, it's part of the OS. A lot of websites will simply stop working for you if your version is too old.

Sounds like a lot of hoop jumping and a lot of caveats. Even I, a pretty tech-savvy individual, wouldn't want to bother with that on my primary phone. Let alone ask a non-technical friend or family member to do so.

However, it's not realistic to say "it's impossible"

As I said, I'm still sporting a 11 year old iPad and using it for what it can do. It works for me. But I'm not expecting to use it like a modern iPad with modern software.

I agree with the device reset, that sucks. I never had to do that so I hadn't thought about this.

This is not true and hasn’t been true since around the time that iOS 7 came out.

About two years ago, I dusted off an old first gen iPad (circa 2010). I reset it and I was able to download “the last compatible version”. It’s option given to you by the App Store. I was able to use Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Spotify, Google Drive to read PDFs.

Not only can you use old versions of software, you can download them again if you reset your device.

Visit the purchased tab in the App Store and select the app you wish to download again, and you will receive the last compatible version for that particular device.

For example I just got an update to an app I've been using for a while. The update will sunset the app despite there being no online component to it. I'd kinda like to downgrade now, but the latest version compatible with my phone would be his sunsetted one.

The latest version tacks on so many ads and “free to play” IAPs that it’s an entirely different game (and tbh one that’s no longer usable). It’s good enough and holds enough nostalgia for me that I would pay $2-5/yr to keep it clean but that’s not an option any more.

Thankfully I have been keeping backups over the years (iMazing) and so I was able to spend some time going through old versions to find a good one, but that is only a solution if you’re planning ahead or if you have a time machine.

In that case, you borrow a newer device, sign in with your Apple ID, and download the app onto that device. Now that app will be in your purchase history and you can download the last compatible version for your older device.

At least I can still load PDFs onto it.

The old apps still install just fine and we’ve never had to make any effort to maintain it, or fiddle with operating systems or software or anything.

It’s hard to imagine a better value from a device like this, especially when you take into account the amount of time you would have to spend managing something that had more software freedom to it.

1) Anything that requires MFA via Apple.

2) Full backup/restore will not restore old versions of the apps. New versions are either unavailable or don't work.

3) Any popular streaming service such as Netflix/Amazon Prime/AppleTV.

2. You can manually go in and download “the last compatible version”

3. Netflix is usually good about supporting old devices. Amazon disabled an older auth protocol. Apple TV+ videos can be accessed via the web (tv.apple.com). While Safari seems to always redirect you to the app, Chrome for iOS doesn’t.

2.) This doesn't work when the app has been removed from the app store.

As an aside, I threw away my 1st gen Apple TV over a year ago because Apple bricked it. It needed MFA to sign in (because it timed out?) and only accepted four digits.

If I use LTE at least I have some coverage.

Not enough of a problem for me to start using 5G yet. But eventually it'll force my hand.

I am an android / windows user. After several years I splurged for an expensive brand new iPad specifically to run music apps such as behringer deepmind (which integrates with their synth).

Couple of weeks later iPad silently installed some os update. Half my apps stopped working! They were apparently incompatible with the current OS and I needed to "contact app developer for an update". Which as you point out isn't going to happen.

This is extreme user-unfriendly BS, but apparently par for the course in Apple Land. Eventually I gave the now-useless iPad to my wife. Lesson learned, though not sure what lesson it was. It's hard to run apps?

Or do you mean that when the user specifically enables “automatic iOS updates”, Apple shouldn’t automatic iOS updates?

If we don’t “blame the victim” for explicitly making a choice , who is at fault?

To be fair, it also obviously happens on Android, and every other platform, though for me on Android it was far more common that device itself stops getting new OS updates and new devices might not run old apps. I was caught by surprise that what seemed to me a small OS security patch or whatever, had an unanticipated and immediate effect on already installed apps.

I have no idea if "Automatic OS updates" was the default setting or if I clicked it at some point when I got the new iPad. I will take the responsibility for that choice, obviously, but my point was that "You can run old apps indefinitely on existing hardware" is not perfect advice.

Here in Sweden taxi and public transport apps need to be kept up to date or they stop working.

This is forced obsolescence in action.

And if the app developer has updated the app and sunsetted certain functions of the old version such that the old app no longer works right despite being installed?

I've had banking apps, which I haven't updated, completely lock me out until I moved to the newer version.

I then thought I would use my ipad as a Shopify POS terminal for my side business when I do pop-ups. I obviously didn't want any of my personal information on _that_, so I reset it and created a new apple id. Except, you can't download any apps! Apple only allows you to download the latest support version of an app IF you had already downloaded it.

This meant first installing on a device with the latest version of iOS. So I began backing up my iPhone 12, resetting it, signing in with the new business apple id, downloading the apps I needed, resetting it, and restoring it with my personal account.

THEN I was allowed to download the latest supported app on my ipad. Success!! Well, no, because the latest supported version of the Shopify POS says I have to upgrade to a new version to use it, which my ipad doesn't support...

So, back to e-waste...

The article is right. Blame us developers for:

  1. Requiring the latest OS instead of lastest-2.
  2. Cutting off older versions of our software from our services.

Otherwise that's 50+ steps of fun to change the battery yourself: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPad+3+Wi-Fi+Battery+Replacemen...

[0] at least before the latest models ? Did they stop doing that ?

How old is very old here? If you're talking about devices that are under ten years old adding 30% to your workload, I would argue that something is wrong on the operating system end of the deal. Part of the reason why we have operating systems is to provide a layer of abstraction so that software is not tied to particular hardware.

> I also don't expect to be able to run VSCode on a 1996 Pentium 60. I'd run Emacs instead, or Vim, or whatever else was en vogue in 1996

I think that most people would agree that expecting support 25+ year old hardware is not reasonable. When you're talking about hardware that is less than 10 years old, people's opinions are going to vary. Those who feel as though they are upgrading without seeing tangible improvements in functionality are likely to be more adamant about longer support periods.

For what it's worth, I have run recent versions of VSCode on my 10+ year old PC. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it's performance of the editor itself, or the associated extensions. I would imagine that it supports much older hardware than what I have simply on the merit that the operating system supports much older hardware.

I've got an iPad 2 which I purchased on the day of release! It's still in great shape and runs well. The original battery still holds a good charge. Still connects fine to modern WiFi networks and my Bluetooth devices.

It still use it for classic iPad gaming, but besides that unfortunately it increasingly struggles to "do things" because the ancient Safari is losing its ability to load/render modern websites properly. If only there was a way to get a more modern web browser on it (maybe there is, with jailbreaking?) then it'd be way more useful.

Side note: I like my iPad 2 but I've long since vowed to never buy another iPad until Apple supports multiple user accounts in iPadOS.

This sounds like making an excuse for completely unnecessarily obsoleting hardware and ignorantly continuing to make hardware that is completely fine spec-wise obsolete. It all be damned, as long as we can make software how we want. No need to see beyond one's own nose, as long as the rare earths can be mined. The planet be damned.

If at least we kept supporting older client side software, I guess people could live with that, but without a doubt, software businesses are a driving force behind the need felt by many people to have a new phone every 1-2 years. Another driving force are manufacturers that try to convince us, that we need their newest ever more dystopian products.

I personally keep using my now more than 12y old phone as a music player and my phone with broken display (not worth the repair costs) which is approximately 8 years old. Some software like Signal or Syncthing can still be installed (some from Fdroid) and I am not using iPhones, but older Android phones. Some day I might have to look into rooting them and install another OS, because I dread the day, when they will stop working and I have the choice of buying an even more dystopian spyware device.

But you know what I could not install, or even find in the app store? The Covid warn app! So these idiots made the app only for newer phones, creating a huge incentive for people to get newer phones and again wasting perfectly fine hardware. All that of course without proper justification. Even my old phones have WLAN and bluetooth and whatever. So I ended up not being able to use the Covid warn app at all, just because I do not like to trash perfectly fine hardware or unnecessarily buy a new phone every year. Great. Just great.