Why buying any modern Apple Product is just a terrible idea.

[VERAULT]

I have an IPAD Gen 3. It was given to me at work when a manager against the wishes of all of us wanted to implement Ipads for "work"... Many many tens of thousands of dollars later we have a Citrix farm and you can technically load these windows mouse driven applications on the ipad... But they arent very useful. Within a couple months half were "lost" or broken. The project just fell apart after that. Everyone just kept theirs at home or gave them to their kids. This info has nothing to do with the statement of this thread its just the backstory on why I have an Ipad G3.

So being that apple forcibly deprecated this device years ago even though it still could do EVERYTHING it was designed to (it was streaming all my services just fine until very recently when it was no longer allowed to) its just STUPID to force these expensive and toxic to produce gadgets into the scrap heap. Even vintage computers can still do things.

Because Apple had locked down the system for no other reason that monetary control there isn't much you can do. I was trying to find a way to jailbreak the device and load some form of android but most of the videos I find are thick indian accents with raging techo music and I really cant follow what they are saying. After two days of trying.. I just gave up. Its way to pointless to exert this much effort towards a device inherently crippled from its designer. Im glad I didn't use any of my own money to buy this thing and feel bad for anyone who has.

I feel the Ipad is the absolute embodiment of planned obsolescence.

Apple really is just an awful company.. How can so many people be that blind to this?

 

[jlang]

I have a Macbook Pro I purchased at the end of 2016. Still works fine and still gets updates.
I will be purchasing a new one eventually.

 

[VERAULT]

I have a Macbook Pro I purchased at the end of 2016. Still works fine and still gets updates.
I will be purchasing a new one eventually.

And how much do you think that will cost?

 

[daver2]

And Microsoft, Google, (substitute any other manufacturer) is better?

Dave

 

[jlang]

About $2500. And I expect it to be supported for about 7-8 years and actually work for about 10 years.

 

[Al Kossow]

I feel the Ipad is the absolute embodiment of planned obsolescence.

Apple really is just an awful company.. How can so many people be that blind to this?

All of their products and their strategy of changing the programming models frequently is intentional to force upgrades.
I haven't bought an Apple product since I quit in 2005

 

[Al Kossow]

And Microsoft, Google, (substitute any other manufacturer) is better?

Dave

They weren't quite as bad, but now, especially Microsoft has figured out people will let them get away
with things they could only dream about in the 90s.

Google doesn't care so much as long as they can suck your eyeballs dry and spy on you
They don't worry about the upgrade treadmill, just making it difficult for anyone else to
compete using any platform they dominate.

 

[VERAULT]

And Microsoft, Google, (substitute any other manufacturer) is better?

Dave

I have never owned a piece of Microsoft hardware sans the Apple II softcard so I couldnt tell you on that regard. I wouldnt buy a google hardware product just from watching the things my wife goes through on her Pixel phone.

If we are talking base android products you tell me.. Are android tablets worse and Apple IOS products? I can honestly say Android is far superior to Apple IOS from the two Iphones I had at work.. They were godawful.

 

[Al Kossow]

About $2500. And I expect it to be supported for about 7-8 years and actually work for about 10 years.

I run lots of 2010 era Supermicro Xeons with the latest Fedora and they work just fine.
That is a LOT of generations of computers in Apple-years.

 

[Al Kossow]

I have never owned a piece of Microsoft hardware sans the Apple II softcard so I couldnt tell you on that regard. I wouldnt buy a google hardware product just from watching the things my wife goes through on her Pixel phone.

If we are talking base android products you tell me.. Are android tablets worse and Apple IOS products? I can honestly say Android is far superior to Apple IOS from the two Iphones I had at work.. They were godawful.

KaiOS (aka Firefox OS) on flip phones is awful.

History of KaiOS

Learn about KaiOS, the world's third most popular mobile operating system

kaios.dev

That's what you get now if you try to buy just a flip phone
A lobotomized Android UI that doesn't have any of the
features that made a flip phone useful.

 

[krebizfan]

Google and Samsung have the best Android update policies. They don't cover as long a duration as Apple does but still reasonable. The lower end Android makes have absurdly short upgrade cycles. Motorola only provides about a year of updates with many phones manufactured after the model's last update since the model will be sold for 3+ years competing against an identical model with updated Android.

I have Motorola phones since they are the budget Android option with good voice calls but they could be so much better with just a little effort on testing upgrades.

 

[Brian Todd]

Apple really is just an awful company.. How can so many people be that blind to this?

I understand why you say this, but I personally find the iPad perfect for email, casual browsing but also to airdrop to our older TV (Netflix etc) and my stereo. Of course Apple lock it down, but does the casual user really care? Also, Apple products are very intutive to use (more so that Android I think).

As for Apple forcibly depreciating the device, I assume you mean that they don't permit update to the latest IOS at a given point? If you look a the specs, older iPads have slower processors, less memory etc. so in my mind it is a bit like trying to load Windows 7 onto a 486 .. difference being that Microsoft does not stop you trying (prior to W11) and Apple does. End result is the same though .. it ain't going to work!

Everyone to their own, but for me an iPad is just a convenience thing and a PC is the workhorse. Each has their own place, and one does not bite the other!

 

[Chuck(G)]

My daily driver is a Chinese X99 system. Works fine; is fast enough for my purposes. I may buy another. I think that case, motherboard/CPU/Memory/video card and power supply ran less than $300. Discovered that I squirreled away a couple of new power supplies when someone (newegg?) had a special.

If you're talking about an absolute waste of resources, consider the laptop and cell phone markets. No upgrade path there that doesn't involve scrapping the whole unit. Because of an upcoming need, I splurged on a new mobile phone--a Moto-G Play. Because of some odd Amazon pricing quirk, it ran me less than $100 new. It doesn't have 5G, but where I live, that doesn't matter; it does have a nice big OLED display, however.

 

[VERAULT]

I run lots of 2010 era Supermicro Xeons with the latest Fedora and they work just fine.
That is a LOT of generations of computers in Apple-years.

I just upgraded my primary Xeon workstation with an X5690 cpu today. Thats the fasted cpu my system can take and I can tell a difference.

KaiOS (aka Firefox OS) on flip phones is awful.

History of KaiOS

Learn about KaiOS, the world's third most popular mobile operating system

kaios.dev

That's what you get now if you try to buy just a flip phone
A lobotomized Android UI that doesn't have any of the
features that made a flip phone useful.

I did not know that but have been really wanted to get a phone with BUTTONS! I have to hit the some phone icon/dial icon up to 4 times it seems just to make a call on a smart phone its terrible.

 

[VERAULT]

As for Apple forcibly depreciating the device, I assume you mean that they don't permit update to the latest IOS at a given point?

I mean they dont allow me to run ANYTHING other than the deprecated last update THEY release. If you buy a pc you can load whatever you want on it. I have heard so many people claim (and I completely disagree with) mobile devices are modern "computers". I say since in many cases you cant run different operating systems they are Devices....

 

[Brian Todd]

I mean they dont allow me to run ANYTHING other than the deprecated last update THEY release. If you buy a pc you can load whatever you want on it. I have heard so many people claim (and I completely disagree with) mobile devices are modern "computers". I say since in many cases you cant run different operating systems they are Devices....

Ah ok, I am with you then. It personally bugs me more how poor the app support is for older IOS .. have to give Netflix credit for allowing all generations of IOS to run their app until very recently. And yes .... for me too they are Devices, which is why I say that each has their place!

 

[HoJoPo]

I have a 2010 Mac Pro with dual X5670 CPUs (so 12 core / 24 thread at 2.93 Ghz), I just upgraded it to 6x16GB RDIMMs for 96GB of triple channel RAM. It's a great Mac OSX Catalina workstation, I have a 4GB EVGA GTX 680 that I flashed with the EVGA OEM MAC EFI ROM so it has full boot screen support. I added a Thunderbolt 3 card to it as well, and it's booting off a 512GB NVME SSD. Still a very capable system though it's 14 years old.

 

[VERAULT]

Ah ok, I am with you then. It personally bugs me more how poor the app support is for older IOS .. have to give Netflix credit for allowing all generations of IOS to run their app until very recently.

Yeah it was nice to use netflix on this thing until it stopped working in the past few months. And because of that it basically has lost all it usefulness (as all the other things I used it for had long since been rendered inoperable).

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I have an IPAD Gen 3

Wait... The 2012 model? The last one that still had the old 30 pin dock connector?

I'm not usually in much of a mood to defend Apple, but that thing is 12 years old and you're complaining that it *just recently* stopped being able to access streaming services?! To put this in perspective that's like bellyaching that the 60mhz Pentium (floating point bug and all) you bought in 1993 was rendered irrevocably obsolete when Youtube debuted *twelve years later in 2005*. Sorry, but in the tech world that's one hell of a run. Looking it up Apple released the last patch release for iOS 9 (last version it runs) in 2019, which meant that thing was getting official support from the manufacturer for seven years. Your typical Android device gets three years of support if you're lucky. (Google recently promised seven years for new Pixel phones, but we'll see if that actually happens.) I actually switched to iPad for my "rot your brain on streaming garbage" device several years ago because I was sick to death of getting screwed by Android tablets (including ones from big manufacturers like Samsung) basically being orphans the day they came out.

(* Also, FWIW, iOS 9 was retained as a valid development target through Xcode 13, which was the 2021-2022 release. So if a developer felt like it they could still support those iPads with new apps a full ten years after they came out. )

Yes, an iPad isn't an open general purpose platform you can (easily) throw whatever OS you want on, so eventually app support for a given model will dry up.(*) But... seriously, for a $500 device a full decade of developer support is absolutely fantastic, and far better than industry average.

(* Also, let's be real about the hardware capabilities of a 2012 vintage portable device. This iPad is optimistically in about the same performance ballpark of a Raspberry Pi 2 and only has a 32 bit CPU. At a certain point you can't really expect developers to restrict their software features to only what ancient hardware that nobody's making money selling anymore can handle.)

 

[VERAULT]

Wait... The 2012 model? The last one that still had the old 30 pin dock connector?

I'm not usually in much of a mood to defend Apple, but that thing is 12 years old and you're complaining that it *just recently* stopped being ...

NO!

Its been pretty useless for YEARS AND YEARS NOW. I just tried to see if I could do something with it in the past two days... This is not a new complaint. Its an old one. The last update to the OS was MANY YEARS AGO! ITs been useless forever now. Netflix was the only thing that ran on it till recently.

And just for some context since the IPAD from 2012ish is useless I am installing ubuntu 24 LTS onto a Dell E6400 from 2008.. And its running fine and all my streaming services are working. Heck im even trying STEAM for some of my simpler games just to see if that works..