A Small Inconvenience of Being an iOS Developer
Last night I realised that for iOS developers, there was a short path from updating your phone OS to making a Macbook purchase. It bothers me.
The path goes this way: you update to latest iOS either because the marketing got you, or the operating system nagged you into making what should have been an innocuous decision.
Then you realise your Xcode needs an update, because the version you have installed is not compatible with latest iOS. You attempt to update Xcode and learn that your MacOS version doesn’t support the update. You attempt to update MacOS and you learn your hardware doesn’t support the version you need.
So you purchase a new Macbook.
While I understand the benefits (for company first, then, its users) of the tight control Apple keeps over its products, the effects can be detrimental, and they lead to waste and inefficiency that offsets some of the goodness their brand has earned in my opinion.
Apple hardware is not cheap, and for most people outside of the US, a purchasing decision is non-trivial. I may be in the minority of opinion-havers when I say this, but such lack of control is in poor taste, especially when it leads to comments such as pic-related on StackOverflow:
The problem with Apple’s obsoleting of reasonably capable hardware and software is that, from my point of view, this is mostly elective. The fact that there exist workarounds (some of which involve modifying Xcode’s .plist files, or enabling locked features at the terminal) suggest that the heavy-handed decisions to drop support for not-entirely-out-of-date products might not be necessary from a technical point of view.
Keep in mind that my 2015 Macbook — the most capable Intel-based hardware I have lying around — will not let me debug the most trivial iOS app on my iPhone because Apple said so, whereas my decade-old HP could still do web development because it can. Longevity is a virtue.
Apple reserves the right to make decisions, and it exercises that agency ruthlessly in the pursuit of profit and product excellence. Regardless, a short rant about the detrimental effects this has on many customers is worth it, as is the idea that maybe they can mitigate this somewhat? I don’t know, I bet the funnel keeps Sales happy.
What I find most fascinating about this is how well-adapted many Apple customers are to this approach. On many Apple online forums, it’s easy to observe a certain shyness about hacking system internals to get your purchase to do what you want.
And, quite often, the solution to a problem will be “take it to your nearest Apple Store for repair/replacement”, among other SF-style options. For context, my “nearest Apple Store” requires an air ticket and a passport.
Perhaps I’m just an old Linux user refusing to get with the program.
