Ten years is a very long time in tech. I wouldn't be confident that the Airtag protocol will be functioning in 2035, and there are already rumors of a new Airtag and possibly a newer protocol coming up.
Add a new Airtag v2 protocol to the next iPhone and sell new Airtags only using that protocol. Why should you buy them? They could have different improvements you would like.
Start deprecating Airtag v1 in 3-4 years - and only sell new ones. There are now 3-4 iPhone generations that can handle the new version.
The next iPhone in 6-7 years doesn't support Airtags v1 anymore as it is obsolete now for many years.
Voila, they killed Airtags v1 in less than 10 years without killing the entire product line by switching to a new version. Is that unrealistic? No, thats their normal way how they deprecate stuff. It still works but only with old hardware or by not getting new updates anymore (iOS, macOS).
But this is an accessory line. Apple is pretty good at keeping accessories working for as long as possible. AirPods v1 still work. A Magic Mouse bought 10 years ago still works as long as the battery isn't dead.
If you're going to put me in a bucket, I'd be in the "Apple Hater" bucket, but I honestly think that the way that they do this is fine. It would have been better if they had jumped on the USB bandwagon earlier, they certainly love to build their own solutions that are incompatible with where the rest of the industry (see also, their proprietary wireless audio, their proprietary bluetooth codec, their proprietary thunderbolt extensions, their proprietary magsafe power connectors, their proprietary Lightning cable/connector, their forking of webkit off of khtml, their changes to webkit that are part of Safari but haven't been pushed upstream to webkit)
Anyways, this is exactly their MO and it's not bad. Apple doesn't need you to contradict everything people say about Apple.
> To replace the removed ports, the iMac has Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports, which were faster and cheaper than Apple Desktop Bus and serial ports but were very new—the standard was not finalized until after the iMac's release—and unsupported by any third-party Mac peripheral.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3#Design
> The last Apple device with Firewire was produced in 2012
Thunderbolt supports the Firewire protocol in the transport layer. So this means that people who need to support a Firewire device need a dongle now. Apple used to sell the adapter, apparently it's been discontinued, but they're still manufactured by third parties, and the originals available on the secondhand market. Which, given that Firewire is dead and buried, and no one is making new Firewire stuff, is also where you'd need to go to get something expecting Firewire to begin with.
I do not see this as the problem you seem to.
But maybe you are talking about something else?
They were also, simultaneously, the first manufacturer to really go all-in on USB. Some PC manufacturers at the time were including one or two USB ports on their systems, but relied on legacy ports (PS/2, serial, parallel, etc) for most functionality. Their USB ports were mostly a show of "look, we have the new thing" - much in the same way that modern PC motherboards may have a single USB-C port on the back, actually.
The best scenario would be an industry standard that is widely more interesting than AirTags and works around the current compromises, letting Apple expand support to a wider audience. E.g. if the stalking problem had an elegant solution.
With wireless devices, protocol changes would brick the device, so they’d be less likely to do it so quickly. As far as I know, Apple haven’t announced any plans to deprecate the original Airpods, which came out 8 years ago and use some custom protocols alongside vanilla Bluetooth.
Maybe in the future they’ll start deprecating parts of the protocol (“in order to save your phone’s battery life” or something), but I don’t believe they have so far.
I highly doubt they do that unless they are remove airtags completely from their product line.
The all-in approach required a forklift upgrade and generated a ton of e-waste.
I'm sure Apple will innovate and come up with something newer/better/etc at some point. But it's unlikely the gen1 devices will go away anytime soon. Even if the real life is only... 5 years, that still saves a number of battery changes for devices that maybe you don't want to deal with regularly.
And with the fact that Apple had enough demand to increase the limit from 16 to 32 per account ( https://9to5mac.com/2024/01/12/airtag-limit/ ). Clearly people have bought into the ecosystem in a big way. 30 Airtags * $25 each is $750. I don't think they'll decommission the gen1 system anytime soon with that much investment. Plus Apple is surprisingly good at supporting their hardware for a reasonable amount of time. The iPhone XR from 2018 is still supported by iOS 18.
It really wasn't that bad. I lived through it.
The iMac was pitched as an entry-level Internet computer for new computer users. Many buyers didn't have a computer at all previous to purchasing an iMac, or only had one which was old enough that its accessories would have been irrelevant (e.g. an external modem). Probably the most common USB accessory purchase was external floppy drives - and a lot of users ended up discarding those after they realized they weren't using them.
Again, it had a long run, I'm not upset that they "only" supported it for 10 years... but let's be very clear, the devices don't work. Also, this is them removing support for a protocol that is part of the base MacOS, so it's exactly like what will eventually happen when Apple stops supporting the original Airpods protocols.
I don't think that's any time soon, and if you're in the Apple ecosystem, go ham... let's just be very clear about the comparisons here.
Also, I thought I was fairly clear in my comment, but Apple removed support in MacOS 13 for Firewire Audio... so it doesn't matter what kind of dongles you have, as soon as you update to 13, your firewire camera no longer works.
It's weird that Apple is removing driver-level support for a protocol. It's unexpected. It's also a dead tech that nobody cares about. The person I was responding to wanted an example of accessories that Apple stopped supporting, and "Anything with Firewire Audio" falls into that category. It is completely, utterly unusable with stock MacOS 13, though it's likely that some people have found a way to put it back in.
Why support the adapter and hard drives, but not audio devices?
(What else used FireWire besides mass storage, audio stuff, the original iSight, and Time Warner Cable boxes from 2005?)