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.

Comments

That's nice

[ColdWetDog]

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.

Re:That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't mind them having those features in the 2017 models. I'd say, keep the "MacBook Pro" line, but rename it, and then produce a true "pro" line of machines designed for photographers, musicians, and others who will pay the cash for a machine that has the reasonable ports for the job, so one doesn't have to carry a backpack full of dongles and hubs with them everywhere. I would say the Dell XPS 13 and XPS 15 are becoming more "MacBook Pros" than what Apple offers.

Maybe Apple could at least fix the MBPs, so if one uses by accident more than one USB-C device that charges, some e-fuse doesn't blow, preventing anything from charging the battery (as per a YouTube vid showing someone using multiple chargers... result, the MBP just stopped charging for good.)

Re:That's nice

[DogDude]

Six years is considered "good" by Apple customers? Really? Do y'all only wear your clothes once and buy new cars every year? Just before posting this (insightful) comment, I just purchased a bunch of refurbished mission critical equipment for our business (workstations and servers), all of which are older than 6 years old, and running OS's that are more than 6 years old (Windows 7 for the workstations). Apple's lack of support is a big reason why we don't use their hardware/software.

Re:That's nice

[UnknownSoldier]

That will never happen. :-(((

Sadly Apple no longer gives a fuck about us professionals -- you know, people who use their computers day in, day out, for creating content. They would rather everyone use iPads for consuming content.

Why?

Before Jobs passed away Tim Cook was responsible for getting Apple's supply chain down from months to days. Apple doesn't want to be holding onto millions of dollars of inventory just sitting there taking up space. This means they remove options and "dumb down" the machines so there is only 1 (or very few) parts. Tim Cook has continued this obsession that it actually has become counter-productive. You can't upgrade a MBP to more then 16 GB of RAM because the RAM is soldered onto the motherboard? WTF.

Apple also has a hard-on for wireless. My current MBP (Mid 2014) has a whopping 7 ports (2x USB, 2x Thunderbolt, 3.5 digital+analog audio, 1x HDMI, SDXC card) and I LOVE it because I use all of them. Apple TV gen 4 removed the audio port because they want everyone to use WiFi streaming. It doesn't take courage to remove an audio jack on the iPhone, they are a bunch of cowards. Gee, oh look, 2 out of 3 "solutions" are wireless.

It is a far cry from the days of Jobs when he actually cared about building not only a cosmetic computer and a functional one.

i.e. When is the Mac Pro going to updated?? It has been over 1075 days!

The only thing Apple cares about these days is making money whilst they whore our their brand. Apple would rather sell over-priced "Beats" garbage headphones to ignorant customers rather then make quality products for the power user. Those days are LONG dead.

It is hard to argue against "Oooh, Shiny!" when all they care about is profits.

Apple is Dead.
Long Live Apple.

Re:That's nice

[Just Some Guy]

all of which are older than 6 years old, and running OS's that are more than 6 years old

hey it's me ur, um, cto. would you please open that email i just sent you so we can, uh, apply some server patches for you? kthx

Re: That's nice

[unixisc]

They could have trade-in programs, w/ the replacement being heavily discounted. The price premium of the obsolete boxes should more than cover the discounts

Re:That's nice

[Grishnakh]

I'd say, keep the "MacBook Pro" line, but rename it, and then produce a true "pro" line of machines designed for photographers, musicians, and others who will pay the cash for a machine that has the reasonable ports for the job, so one doesn't have to carry a backpack full of dongles and hubs with them everywhere.

Why should they bother doing this? It'll just cost them more money to have more machines in their line-up. They can just do what they're doing now, keep the number of options very small, to increase profit, because all those people you mention will just buy the port-less machines anyway, plus the overpriced adapters to go with it. Sure, they might complain, but so what? They're not going to forgo buying a Mac.

I would say the Dell XPS 13 and XPS 15 are becoming more "MacBook Pros" than what Apple offers.

Nope, because they aren't Macs, so all those Mac buyers aren't going to even look at them.

Maybe Apple could at least fix the MBPs, so if one uses by accident more than one USB-C device that charges, some e-fuse doesn't blow, preventing anything from charging the battery (as per a YouTube vid showing someone using multiple chargers... result, the MBP just stopped charging for good.)

Why should they bother fixing this? Are they losing any sales due to this? Of course not. So there's no point in lifting a finger to fix it. I really don't see the problem here. If some people manage to mess up their MBPs this way, then they'll just have to buy new MBPs (or pay $$$ to get Apple to repair them), which simply increases Apple's profits even more.

Re:That's nice

[brantondaveperson]

As much as I mourn the loss of USB-A ports, it's not quite the case that you need a bunch of dongles. USB-C is pin-compatible, and what you actually need are different leads. USB-C to USB-mini, for example.

Unsubstantiated claim of seriously broken USB-C support.... or, maybe, it's actually more like this

Re:That's nice

[brantondaveperson]

I would say the Dell XPS 13 and XPS 15 are becoming more "MacBook Pros" than what Apple offers.

People buy macs because of OSX. This is because Windows, even today, is still horrible.

Re:That's nice

[FyRE666]

You know, some people say this, but give absolutely no evidence for the assertion. I use a Windows desktop and 2015 Macbook Pro daily (as well as Linux on servers) and honestly prefer Win10 to OSX. The file explorer is much more intuitive for me, it handles multiple displays much better, and obviously there's whole gaming thing.

I think some Mac fanboys probably haven't used Windows since Win 95, and still think it behaves as badly. It's like me comparing Win10 to OS9 (which was truly terrible - I had to suffer through that!)

Re:That's nice

[_merlin]

They lost me as a customer. I used Macs for decades, but I've switched to Dell Precision for my desktop, and when my 2010 MBP dies, I'm sure as hell not replacing it with a Mac. The transition is a pain in the arse, but I'm not wasting my money on the crap they call pro models these days.

Re:That's nice

[UnknowingFool]

Only if you pay MS lots of money. If it's a server that's almost $600 per year.

Not important

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not important

[_merlin]

The trouble with all this is they still need people to create the content for iPad users to consume. Web content can be published from Windows/Linux easily enough with just some testing on target devices, but they still need a viable app development platform. If they alienate developers badly enough, no-one will want to use a Mac even to develop for iOS. What do they do then? Release tools for targeting iOS while developing on Windows or Linux? Part of their sales pitch has always been the "whole ecosystem" argument. Could they really kill that and still survive? They'd probably be reduced to receiving poorly ported Android apps.

Obsolete?

[0100010001010011]

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.

Re:Obsolete?

[ELCouz]

Firewire is obsolete...better hurry to upgrade that camcorder! Follow the Apple trend....!!!

Re:Obsolete?

[0100010001010011]

Using it to import even older Legacy stuff. Turns out people put a lot of video on VHS. A Firewire VHS deck is still the most dependable option. Every USB RCA 'digitizer' I've found is made by companies long out of business, has lackluster Windows support to begin with and flat out refuses to work with Linux.

dvgrab works on Linux but you can't view the tape as it comes in. And as I said kdenlive dropped all firewire support with their latest version and the bug is labeled as "won't fix". So please oracle on the internet, tell me a better, faster and easier way to do the above because the workflow I gave is the best I've found. And easy enough that I can pass off to a 10 year old to do.

Unless you're volunteering to digitize all this stuff, at which point just give me a shipping address and I'll give you an FTP server to dump it on. It's only a few hundred hours.

Re:Obsolete?

[R.Mo_Robert]

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.

That's fine--it's just not what Apple means when a product becomes "obsolete," which is a term they use to denote hardware for which they will no longer supply official parts for repair, generally those that were discontinued more than 7 years ago (or 5 for "vintage" products, which means almost the same thing except that there are still parts available in certain circumstances). In many cases their software/OS updates still support these machines, and you're obviously welcome to keep using them as long as you want in any case (though I'd personally avoid putting anything without recent updates on the Internet).

Re:Obsolete?

[evilviper]

dvgrab works on Linux but you can't view the tape as it comes in.

That's not true at all. Linux has no file locking, so you can quite easily view the video file in real-time as they're being created and extended. A simple tail -F VIDEO.DV | mplayer - should work, though adjusting cache sizes might be necessary for some formats.

Re:Obsolete?

[epyT-R]

https://github.com/umlaeute/v4...
If kdenlive supports v4l2, this might help. I don't have a dv cam to test this with, but the module builds just fine on my x86_64 kernel 4.8.11 system. All I did was clone with git and type make. Your distro might even have pkgs for it.

So what, why is this even a story?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.....

Defining Vintage vs. Obsolete

[davidwr]

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.

Re:History will repeat itself

[MachineShedFred]

To be fair, Apple had a true professional market not too long ago. Then they started acting like they knew better than the professionals and started making software and hardware that is not suited to meet the professionals' needs. So the pros went elsewhere.

At one point, the only two games in town for non-linear video edit were Apple and Avid. Then they dumbed down Final Cut Pro and made sure that it only runs it's best on inferior hardware. This has allowed Adobe Premiere back into the game, because they decided to go all-in with CUDA and Nvidia.

Apple are doing what they have done every year...

[PhunkySchtuff]

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...

After 13 years I'm slowly moving away from Apple

[Qbertino]

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.