Darwin's Theories Blog

New Theories for a New Time

Don't Tell Me About How Apple is Better About Support than Android

2012-08-15

I have grown tired of hearing how Apple is so much more noble than Android because Apple always provides OS support for older devices. I really don't want to hear this argument anymore, because it's a load of you-know-what.

Case in point. I paid for a license to Keynote, Apple's wonderful slide show program (which I reviewed for O'Reilly, lo these many years). According to the Apple App Store License, I am granted the right: "to download, install use and run for personal, non-commercial use, one (1) copy of the Apple Software directly on each Apple-branded computer running OS X 10.7.4 or later ("Mac Computer") that you own or control..." (emphasis added).

Well, it happens that I own one Mac and control another. At least, mostly. But the second Mac has an issue, beyond my control and not relevant here, that prevents it from being upgraded from 10.6.8 to 10.7. Now Keynote is not a new program; it has been around since the days of, oh, 10.2 or something. There is absolutely no reason it has to be tied to 10.7 and refuse to run on 10.6. Well, actually there is. It's greed. Apple insists on selling those OS upgrades - the kind of thing that a lot of Android vendors give you over the air for free, when they do get around to them - for each and every single machine before you can run software that you've paid for on them.

Now before all the Apple fanbois bring out the heavy artillery, it's obvious that I respect and sometimes like Apple stuff. But I just get tired of hypocritical arguments about one vendor being pure and the other set being greedy bastards, when the fact is, they're all just out to sell hardware. As long as we all admit and recognize that, there's no reason why "we can't all just get along."


Update: this was written years ago, and lots of policies have changed since then.