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Snow Leopard Drops Palm OS Sync
adeelarshad82 writes "It's been just a little over a month since Apple blocked iTunes sync with Palm Pre, and now Apple takes that strategy one step further by blocking Snow Leopard sync with Palm-OS powered smartphones. Even though Palm has officially retired Palm OS and is now focusing hard on its next-generation WebOS in the Palm Pre, the company is still selling Palm OS-powered smartphones; two current models are the Treo Pro on Sprint and the Centro."
Sure, but there is a difference between legacy as in hardware, legacy that requires lots of code and legacy that is relatively small. My guess is Palm OS sync isn't that big of a program, nor does it need constant updating. So either A) Release it as a downloadable update, B) Or include it as an option when installing. Taking it out though, that just screams anticompeditive.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It cost money to continue shipping floppy disks, it does not cost any more money to keep syncing with Palm devices.
Of course it costs money to keep syncing with deprecated hardware. Apple will have to support this software bridge for the lifetime of Snow Leopard (2 years? 4? more?). Cutting out essentially deprecated software will make the OS easier (and cheaper) for Apple to support in the long run.
That being said, I have no doubt that the upper management at Apple was all smiles when the announcement was made that PalmOS Sync was being dropped.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
As someone who is still holding onto his Zire (five years now?) and is about to upgrade to Snow Leopard: this isn't going to impact me because it only changes syncing the Apple calendars and contacts. Sure it would be nice if Apple supported the conduit but I figure it simply: Microsoft never supported ActiveSync for PalmOS, why are people getting concerned when Apple is dropping support for PalmOS since they were the ones writing it themselves not the product vendor? Given Palm's recent bout of laziness in abusing iTunes to support their device, I can't fault Apple for not wanting to support Palm's unsupported proprietary device.
It would be nice if it was all integrated but I'm still going to be able to sync my device using the ancient Palm Desktop tool. There is the Missing Sync which provides support for the Palm under Mac. All that is happening is that Apple isn't shipping some code they wrote probably because it was going to be a pain to port it to 64-bit.
To be quite honest, so far they've gone above and beyond.
I always wondered where this setting was...
There's already a solution, in Missing Sync for Palm OS, which already handles synching to more recent Palm devices (Centro and Treo) much better than Apple's legacy support. I don't know anyone who has a Mac and a Treo and /doesn't/ already use Missing Sync anyway over Apple's grotty and outdated legacy Palm code. I would guess that Apple yanking Palm OS support from iSync and letting Missing Sync fill that particular slot in the Sync Services food chain is an acknowledgment of that fact.
--Rachel