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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."
s/blocking/dropping support for/
Nothing, IIRC, is stopping Palm from doing the heavy lifting required to support their devices in OS X except Palm.
Palm dropped support for this YEARS ago. You can hardly blaim apple for not taking over support of a product that the manufacturer declared dead.
So why would Apple spend time developing a feature for it? Especially since all 3 of the people still using Palm OS devices can purchase an app that does the same thing. Looks to me like the press is making a mountain from a molehill.
Support for legacy technologies gets dropped all the time. It sucks, but it opens up new opportunities for enterprising developers. Besides, Palm themselves stopped making Palm Desktop for the Mac ages ago.
Obviously there is lingering demand. So, in due course there will be an open source solution to sync from the Mac OS to the Palm OS. After all, it's not rocket science.
So there you go. Competitiveness is restored.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Palm Desktop stopped functioning years ago, so Apple finally dropping support for it is not a bad thing at all. I'm sure Missing Sync for Palm OS will be continue to function or be updated to function in Snow Leopard. I know I had to use it with my Centro since the decrepit Palm Desktop didn't work for it. Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices also rely on third-party software to sync in Mac OS X. Apple dropping support on their side is a non-issue.
So Apple should keep working on a niche market that is already well served by a third party? Why? Should Apple keep parallel and serial ports alive? Should I be upset that 10.6 doesn't work with my 1998 Winprinter? Where does it stop?
So, all 2000 users of Palm PDAs / Treos can either 1) stay at 10.5 - which isn't such a bad OS or 2) Go buy Missing Sync (which, I imagine, since Palm synching in OS 10.5 and earlier was pretty rudimentary 1990 of said users probably already have).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If Palm want a way to sync on OS X they should write the software themselves. Oh wait, they did and discontinued it.
Jesus, Jobs, have you no heart? First you killed off the floppy disk drive. Then you wiped out serial ports in favor of USB. Now you're blowing out syncing technology that barely anyone uses any more in order to streamline your OS... shame, shame on you.
Sorry, I'm having a real hard time getting worked up over this, or even seeing a nefarious scheme behind it.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
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.
Nothing stopping Palm releasing software to allow syncing on OS X. They just chose to discontinue it and instead rely on Apple to provide it.
Then went and pissed off Apple with the whole "I'm an iPod really" private USB vendor code spoofing thing.
Doesn't surprise me that Apple are hardly going to concern themselves with syncing with PalmOS - an OS that Palm itself is dead, out of goodwill for Palm.
Nothing is being blocked. Apple is simply discontinuing their own support for Palm devices. Palm itself stopped officially supporting Macs years ago. There's nothing preventing users from running third-party software to sync.
Legacy?
This sync method was the foundation for a lot of devices beyond palm. The fact that Palm is moving on is not germane.
Its just code, code that has already been extensively debugged, widely deployed and is still in use by many people for many devices.
This isn't about legacy.
Its about that child running Apple, and his petty tantrums.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Its not a niche market, its every single palm phone except the absolute most recent one. Every single palm sold before June 6th, 2009 is affected.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
Why should Apple not be allowed to have its walled garden?
Because they'll lose customers.
And customers are always, ALWAYS allowed to complain.
Which is a niche. Treo sales have been in steady decline ever since the 700p, and that was 2-3 years ago. Contrary to the summary, the Treo Pro does not run Palm OS - it's Windows Mobile.
Users can still use the far superior Missing Sync, and Palm could always update Hotsync. This is a non-issue.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
So if they buy a copy of snow leopard, they're apple's customers, but if they also have a Palm, they automatically stop being apple's customers ?
Nice logic there smart boy.
The Palm connector, maintained by PALM, has languished for years. It suffers from TERRIBLE limitiations on Mac OS X, and it always had (you can only sync ONE address per contact, etc.). It was broken and really not updatedy by Palm as long ago as Mac OS X 10.4.
If you want to sync a Palm device, buy "The Missing Sync" and you're good to go. Works fine. Sure, it's extra $, but that's what you pay for that boat anchor.
Nothing like anticompetitiveness to turn me off.
You seem misinformed, which is understandable given the misleading blurb linked to in this story. Here's what happened. Apple made iSync and told phone makers to use it to synch with OS X. Palm ignored them and continued to use a really, really old Palm Desktop program as their officially suggested method, but refused to support it. Apple, not wanting PalmOS phone users to be dissuaded from using Macs and thinking Palm's unsupported solution was crap, took it upon themselves to write iSync plug-ins for PalmOS. Now Apple has dropped those plug-ins. That's not even close to anti-competitive.
It's sad, too. I was considering getting a Pre...
The Pre doesn't use PalmOS and so is not affected.
(Actually: They bought a piece of software Apple discontinued in the late 90's*, updated it a bit, then discontinued it themselves about 5 years later. Which is around 5 years ago at this point.)
*Claris Organizer, if you are interested.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
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
"No, as Palm themselves dropped support years ago, these cries scream unfounded BS."
Umm, they blocked the pre. They now don't support any Palm prior to this year, which I believe the Pre is really the only new release.
iow, this year alone, they've phracked with every Palm device ever made. This seems pretty established, so I think you mean something else when you chose the word unfounded. It's directly anticompetitive by definition, as it eliminates or hinders another products viability on their platform for the time being.
Apple has no obligation to support or help Palm, is the way I look at it. What they did is legal anti-competitive behavior, but unhardly contradictory to the anti-competitve claim--that is the fundamental nature of business.
Someone smarter than me can maybe elucidate this breakdown further, but I had to respond given your comment was mod'd a +3 insightful for some odd reason.
Maybe I don't know, Palm could write their own Mac stuff instead of relying on Apple to do it for them ? I don't see how this is anti-competitive, Palm OS is not a Apple product, they don't have to support it, write software for it or update legacy code to work with their new OS.
Palm can do the work themselves if they think it's worth it. Apple isn't stopping them from downloading Xcode and writing a Cocoa based app to sync with their own hardware.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
There is support for Vista here: http://kb.palm.com/wps/portal/kb/common/article/32859_en.html