I would say the Mac Pro was "killed", left to languish after the trashcan model, then isolated from third party GPUs when it finally got upgraded to Apple Silicon, and then left to languish again until the lack of sales justified killing it.
Rosetta 2 will certainly deserve a spot on this list next year when they start yeeting it, an amazing piece of technology that has made Apple Silicon-era Macs uniquely capable of executing the widest range of software.
The expectation should not be for products to last for ever.
And for each product that happened, more products came after that were inspired by it.
These are all the stuff I miss and I wish they would come back.
On iPhone Air, currently at 6.5" gets a Silicon Carbon Battery upgrade, I hope we also get iPhone Air Mini at 5.95". The current iPhone Air still sold better than iPhone Plus. It should continue to stay in the product line.
It's not on the site, and I don't care _quite_ enough to figure out how to add it.
That's the problem with built-in software that "does it all" and crowds out the market for other software. One day it might not do it all.
(VLC can do this, but not as simply as I used to be able to).
At Gawker, They Battled a Billionaire. 10 Years Later, the Scars Are Still Healing https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/inside-ga...
Jefferson and Read had sold a scripted series to Apple titled Scraper that was based on the inner workings of Gawker, and the quartet, along with a handful of, as Carmichael puts it, “very accomplished, amazing screenwriters and playwrights on Broadway,” were producing scripts for the first season. [...] “Max and I had been concerned about that when we sold the project to Apple,” says Jefferson, but the executives developing the project “told us there was a very protective firewall between the TV side and the tech side.” But a month before the writers room wrapped with scripts for the first season’s eight episodes, Jefferson recalls, “an executive called me and said word had reached Tim Cook that we were doing a show set in a world similar to Gawker, and he had put the kibosh on it personally.” Jefferson and his 3 Arts Entertainment manager Jermaine Johnson (who also represents Read and Carmichael) say they heard about but never saw an email in which Cook allegedly referred to Gawker as rife with “vile human beings.” (Cook did not respond to requests for comment.)
The quality of entries on killed by apple seems largely comparable if not higher.
Good. Apple users are a minority in my local community, yet the vast majority of broken charging ports over the years have been Lightning. Some micro-USB, and zero USB-C problems so far.
Usually these pages convey how capricious the parent is, but this just feels like an arbitrary accounting of things Apple has moved or updated, with a few of them not having replacements.
It would be nice, but perhaps hard to do, to have a list of "sherlocked" apps and services.
I dunno, I mean… sigh.
There's stuff that deserves to be noticed, like the Mac Pro. The category is a beefy machine with expansion slots and the ability to run so hard that you need massive cooling. Even if the chips have become far more efficient, there's still space for running something so overpowered that you need physics to cool it. They just gave up on this space and it made some people sad (including me, even if I'm no longer that demographic, because I was for two decades).
And then there's the thing that just stopped mattering to most people because it wasn't relevant anymore. I remember my father, who used to love making mixed CDs in iTunes, asking why MacOS got worse at burning music CDs. I had to tell him that what he wanted wasn't the thing anymore. I essentially told him that he was "holding it wrong." It felt bad. Was that killed by Apple or did the market just move on? I'd argue the latter.
If you want to drive engagement, Killed By Apple isn't a bad name. I think that's basically the sum of the idea and not much else.
I have a house full of Apple hardware and none of them get updates from Apple anymore, and I can't manually update them without hackery (OpenCore) or wiping them to install Linux (where possible). Also, because third party app developers largely align with Apple's philosophy, less and less 3rd party software even works on my computers anymore. Heck, even Homebrew, which ships open source software that has always run on my devices, relegates my hardware into their "tier 3" garbage can[1].
The combination of Apple's and third party's disinterest counts as "killed by Apple" in my book.
And even then, I can still sync my 20+ year old firewire ipod with the most recent Apple Music (formally iTunes) on my m4 MacBook with the right converter.
When Apple introduced Lightning it was as the "modern connector for the next decade" and... that's exactly what happened.
Like by 2010 you only burned CDs for the stuff what couldn't accept the flash drives ie mostly for the car audio systems. And by 2015 the need for ODD just disappeared though they were still included in servers and desktop PCs out of habit. But by 2020 a 'desktop' PC became SFF/USFF/USDF and you couldn't mount ODD there even if you want (though Lenovo sold mounting bracket for ODD for their Tiny series).
But don't worry, Rosetta 2 is also on the chopping block:
> Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...
tl;dr: Rosetta is sticking around through macOS 27. After that, the normal Rosetta will be removed from macOS. but a subset of Rosetta will remain to support certain older unmaintained games.
I agree that the SE was a great iPhone and a great form factor. I didn't have one, but my kid did. Whenever I had to do something on their SE, I found it so much more usable than my own whatever Pro phone of that time. It wasn't enough to get me to go to an SE, however.
It still find myself missing what seems to be basic capabilities while using Photos.
Best form goes to the Neo, current Air, or 2015 MBP.
They should be offering a 12” Air now.
Some of the text is silly sour grapes, but it always will be with editorial content about tech products.
I held out using MacPorts for ages, but there came a point when I just could not reasonably expect to find the software I needed on MacPorts, but could on Homebrew, and so I switched. I wish Homebrew hadn't won that particular mindshare war. Moving from MacPorts to Homebrew felt like downgrading from an actual package manager to a duct-taped shell script.
I think it's more about 3rd party app developers attempting to improve their products and stay relevant.
If Apple releases a new framework or API that would make a developer’s app better, but it requires macOS 14 or later, are they not supposed to incorporate it?
I've noticed lots of 3rd party developers keep older versions of their apps available for older macOS versions.
And yet the HomePod wasn't "killed" just because they upgraded from gen 1 to gen 2. Gen 1 HomePod literally just got a software update a month ago. The iPhone X wasn't "killed" just because they released the iPhone 11. This list is egregiously version-centric for things where it makes no sense.
If you've ever tried to run a hardware business (or really any business), you know that it is not financially sound to continue to support old devices that have been superceded (sometimes more than once) by newer products that consumers are currently spending money on.
We can debate if this is the way things should be, the aspect of whether you truly "own" things, software escrow, and on and on. But the phenomenon itself is in no way unique to Apple. If anything, I have found that the usable lifespan of Apple hardware is, on average, longer than the usable lifespan of other name-brand electronics in similar categories.
iTunes -> Apple Music
Apple TV Remote App -> Apple TV Remote in Control Center
Dashboard -> Desktop Widgets
Find My Friends -> Find My
iPhoto -> Photos
Game Center app -> Games/Apple Arcade
Newsstand -> Apple News
iChat -> iMessage
Final Cut Studio/Server -> Final Cut Pro
AppleTalk -> AirDrop
as just a few examples.
But I know, I'm not the target audience anymore.
So while it's not gonna be the next Moltbook in terms of security breaches, it's basically just the 2026 version of your middle manager copy-pasting a paragraph from ChatGPT web into Slack. It's content from nobody for nobody. It's definitely not what I want to see on the HN front page, but I guess if people get a kick out of it then you do you.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/27/app-store-monthly-subsc...
This page could have used some heavy editing after asking the LLM to compile all stuff from wikipedia.
Lost it at the Lightning listing, which apple still first party even:
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/muqw3am/a/lightning-to-us...
It used to be that there was Android for those who didn't want the Apple way of doing things and wanted more control over their pocket computer, but Google saw how rich Apple got off the walled garden and has been slowly boiling the frog in that direction for years now.
That's a knock against Apple, not a bragging point.
I'm a Windows user who also develops for Windows desktop and it's kind of sad that even though Windows has a way larger desktop share, there just isn't much going on compared to MacOS. Every week I read about some cool new or updated MacOS application and I can't remember the last time I read something similar about a Windows application (other than games).
The only reason I can think of is that MacOS developers are more motivated at least in part by having users that are willing to support developers by paying for software.
In turn, users and developers willing to pay for computing motivates and enables Apple to make better hardware. They don't always get it right, but I think they are doing a better job than most companies. It's also the reason why I think Apple's recent push for services revenue is so dangerous. The incentives aren't as aligned with users.
Maybe next year Framework or System76 will come out with their answer to Apple's M-series chips and I'll have to re-evaluate, but right now it feels like it's Apple against everybody else and everybody else is racing to the bottom.