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Some MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini Models Will Become Obsolete Next Month, Lose Apple Repair Support (9to5mac.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Apple will add certain MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini models to its list of vintage and obsolete products starting next month, which means the products will lose official Apple repair support through the company's retail stores and authorized resellers. Kicking in on December 31, 2016, the MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2011) and MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2011) will become vintage and obsolete in all markets where applicable, while the Mac mini (Early 2009) and MacBook (13-inch, Mid 2009) will become obsolete worldwide on the same date.
Six years is a pretty good run an all. That said, I do wish they would actually update the 2011 17" MBP with the nifty matte screen and the upgradable memory and hard drive bays. Oh, an ports.
A professional machine.
Sigh.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Tim Cook said himself that PCs are dead and people should buy iPads.
The Mac mini has not been upgraded since 2012, which is proof enough that Apple doesn't care about making computers anymore.
Apple is the old Nokia.
The new Nokia is the old Apple.
Bet on it!
Ok, that makes sense.
will become obsolete worldwide on the same date.
I have a 2006 MacMini. With iMovie '06 it's still the best front end to a Firewire camcorder I've found. The latest kdenlive dropped Firewire import.
For basic video editing it still works rather well. Transcoding is slow so I export everything in .dv and convert it on a faster machine.
Doesn't seem very obsolete to me.
So is Microsoft. They just haven't figured it out yet.
So what's the issue here, beside the fact that their more modern systems are less appealing than those that are being replaced - looking at MBP with the touch bar and the Macbook with one single port.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
First
which I have running quite comfortably on a 10 year old PC with an extra DIMM or two of RAM...MacOS is nice and Apple HW is good stuff but the whole myth of Apple HW lasting longer than PC is just that, a myth.
What about the ones with the graphics processor recall?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Products go EOL all the time, 2009 isn't a bad cut off year. It is 2016, and those computers would be cheaper to replace than to fix.
Is someone going to complain that the Apple ][ is no longer supported? No one in their right mind is going to say yes. On a small scale it would be OK due to old infrastructure that will not change for another 30 years because the systems have to meet a set of requirements that are not standard.
It doesn't make good business sense to support products at a mass scale for long periods of time. These are not craftsman tools with lifetime warranties.
A few may promise lifetime warranties, with a big ole asterix next to their statements.
Despite what you may think, computers are consumable items. And most items will no longer be used after 5 years, and by 10 they are almost gone with the exception of a few. The risk is low if the company makes a decent product.
Maybe they'll be kind and throw $5 at you for your smashed powerbook.....
New: New.
Current: Still being sold.
Supported: Supported by a vendor or reliable third party.
Old but useful: Hey, it runs and it's doing something productive.
Obsolete: No practical use except as a pile of parts, nobody else wants it, *may* have non-negative scrap value if there isn't anything hazardous in it
Vintage: There is a sucker out there who thinks it may become collectable someday.
Collectable: Apple I, single-digit-serial-numbered original Macintosh 128K, etc.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Not supporting a generation of devices has nothing to do with Apple.It has however everything to do with users.Apple buys parts in huge numbers and can keep supplylines open much longer.The value of the device however is getting rapidly smaller.Such a six or seven year old device has very little value.Cost of work and parts can easily surpass the value of the device.
I have a 2010 Macbook Air and it still functions but each successive OSX "upgrade" to the software has made it slower and dumbed it down to the point where it is pretty much useless.
I finally bought a Chromebook which, even though it only has an ARM processor, is much faster and more responsive than my MacBook. I have it set up to switch to Linux (using Crouton it's just a hot key switch) if I need to do some programming or any bash stuff. (Of course, it was much cheaper... and it's much better... even has a touch screen so can fold it back and use it as a tablet)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Every company e.g. Dell etc does the same. The fact that you don't know where the list is simply mean or even if it's published means you'll turn up at their service center and they tell you it can't be repaired that's all.
The fact you can get independent shops to repair stuff is not the point. There are independent shops who can repair macs too, just not as common thought.
I mean it's just like servers. Things goes into obsolesence about the same 5-7 years and they stop supporting or sell you shit expensive extended support then cut you off in another 1-2 years.
Hardware, sure. But mainly what breaks is software anyway. Batteries for the laptops. And there are plenty of vendors for the replaceable battery designs like the 17" macbook pro (you bought one with a conformal battery, you bought planned obsolescence, deal with it.)
Apple could do a much better job. They could stop leaving hugely broken OS versions behind them, only to put out yet another version with new breakage, like 10.12, which :frankly: sucks. Sorry, Frank. The 2008 8-core mac pros, for instance, are still great machines. Fast, superior hardware design, hugely upgradable. But the new OS won't run on them. Not "runs unsupported", even -- just "won't run."
Apple is not your friend. Apple is not my friend. We are something to monetize. Believe it, because it's the truth.
I own a few Mac mini (Early 2009) and once they are no longer supported by Apple, they are subject to a full refund should they fail under the local state laws. There have been many rulings involving full refunds for non-supported white goods with one example of a $400 washing machine failing a few years after the warranty with no ability to repair it and the ruling said something along the lines that "the device was expansive and people expect it to last much longer than the warranty period" with ordered a full refund. Similar cases have resulted in orders for a new product to replace the old unsupported one. Since the current Mac mini is slower than some of the older ones and cost over $1,000 with reasonable memory, I can't see Apple winning let alone arguing that it is "obsolete" or "vintage".
Only Official support has been dropped. They can still be fixed for a price.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Apple are doing what they have done every single year - retiring old models from their supported lineup. Film at 11.
Every year, a range of Macs pass through the range of support status from "Supported" to "Vintage" to "Obsolete"
Vintage products are those that have not been manufactured for more than 5 and less than 7 years ago. Apple has generally discontinued hardware service for vintage products in most regions other than the state of California and Turkey.
Obsolete products are those that were discontinued more than 7 years ago. Apple has discontinued all hardware service for obsolete products with no exceptions. Service providers cannot order parts for obsolete products through Apple.
https://support.apple.com/en-a...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Just got a new laptop off the company. 3 year lease. W7. Yeah, they'll support us. They do that.
My 3yo laptop is actually a very useful piece of kit, and according to the supplier who has just attempted to replace it with some more modern POS, he needs it back to sell to someone else. I deduce from that it has a market value>>almost nothing.
I added Apple to my hardware selection of Linux boxes back in 2003.
I like Apple hardware and the new MB Pro is very neat. The huge touchpad, the awesome keyboard and the retina display are are all very neat things. However, after getting an iBook G4 back in 2003 (cheapes Subnote available at the time), a Mac Mini (cheapest mini PC available at the time) a few years later and an MB Air in 2011 (only ultrabook available at the time (the class "Ultrabook" didn't even exist yet), my new machine will be an generic netbook without any OS preinstalled. I'll install linux on it, as usual with non-Apple hardware.
Why?
While Apple is quite neat, I'm increasingly wary of the Apple golden cage and their lock-in. Apple pay built into the new MB Pros doesn't help. Also, Apple products arent' so stand-alone innovative as they used to be and the prices have risen. My new machine, coming this week, will be a 300 Euro Netbook with a quadcore CPU and 10 hours of battery time. Vis-a-vis a minimum of 1700 Euros for the new MB Pro that's just to huge a gap to justify the expense.
Another prime reason for me to get an OS X machine has disappeared: I used to do professional Flash development. Since Flash is basically dead and it is the first and last prorpietary non-FOSS technology I've ever invested time in, there is no reason for me to keep a system around that runs the Flash IDE. Linux is as flaky and obscure as ever, but it hasn't gotten worse and Java (for my Jetbrains IDE) and Web (for everything I develop today) work just as fine as with macOS.
Homebrew and other FOSS macOS projects such as iTerm are very neat too, but I still trust compling on pure FOSS OSes more. On my MB Air I'm still running Maveriks, and brew starts complaining about the outdated compiler. Since the MB Air is a little to weak for El Capitan, I'm slowly getting stuck between a rock and a hard place with this.
I might get an MB Pro again some time in the future, but it would be more for kicks than anything else. They build nice machines, no doubt, but Linux for Pros and ChromeOS for n00bs cover 99.99% of the markets needs and costs roughly a 5th. And with Linux I'll be in control until the day I die. Or at least longer than I would be with Apples neatly bound hard- and software packages.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This has been Apple's policy since at least the 90's. Maybe longer. Interesting this made it as an article to Slashdot.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624
Vintage products are those that have not been manufactured by Apple for between five and seven years. Obsolete products are those that were discontinued by Apple more than seven years ago. Apple and Authorized Service Providers make no distinction between obsolete and vintage products outside of Turkey and California.
When people are making external graphics cards to connect to your laptops, you're not updating your laptops often enough.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad