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VLC - App stores were a mistake
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this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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Name a company that gives security updates to 15 year old tablets.
I wish they did, but this is hardly just an Apple problem. The only reason I bring this up is because people very quickly dunk on Apple without thinking about the fact that we need more access to all of our hardware in order to increase the longevity for those who want to.
Frankly I find iPads work longer on average than most other tablets. Purely anecdotal though.
The other elephant in the room is that most people don’t want to use 15 yr old tablets. I know I don’t want to edit video on 15 yr old desktops, even though they were perfectly capable of editing 15 years ago. But not current videos. Just like 15 year old tablets will not be able to readily stream or display a lot of modern content correctly.
Why does it have to be a company?
Tons of old hardware continues to be useful to its owners just by virtue of being on open and maintainable platforms.
But Apple continues to push harder and harder for planned obsolescence while claiming they support their devices better than the competition.
Apple earns unique hate in this category because of how strenuously they fight against things like right to repair. Failing to support old products isn't the end of the world but intentionally making it so that old products aren't supportable is very bad and the Apple App Store is a major instrument for making sure old Apple devices stop being useful.
apple does 'support' their hw better, it's just that it's a pretty low bar to start with these days. they and their competitors could do better--much better, but zomg! someone has to think of the shareholders. they're far more important than users or the planet.
Apple innovates in new and exciting ways to not support devices. They invent new antirepair technologies and have pioneered locked-in walled-garden app stores that prohibit users from doing what they want or need to keep their devices working.
They don't get to wear the white hat just because they do some shit well. They are the bad guy. And they could change posture pretty much immediately if they were at ALL serious about their devices having long-term support. They control basically their whole tech stack and could make it so their devices can continue to be maintained indefinitely even if they aren't doing it. But control matters more to them than support.
I really don't think anyone should be giving them credit here, not even as a backhanded compliment.
They only support their hw better on phones and tablets. On a computer you'll longer support from Windows or Linux LTS distros. I have a 13 year old laptop still running the latest version of Ubuntu
My iPad2 can’t do internet anymore, or for instance used as a panel for home assistant webpage or client, but it’s perfectly fine as a homestudio controller and music / midi generator and that is what I still use it for. Battery is still great too. I got it about 13 years ago and I will be using it until it stops working. Looks as good as new too.
I do have a recent iPad too, it's for all the stuff I cannot do on the old one.
Almost any iPad works great as a second monitor as well, with minimal setup. I wish they could be easilly made to work like a Bamboo tablet for drawing purposes though.
So the ending to the story which i didnt feel like typing out earlier was that i loaded debian on to the macbook and it runs 2x faster now with regular security updates....
The vast majority of people will never edit a video. The vast majority would be perfectly happy doing 90% of their work in a browser on older hardware instead of chucking it in the bin
i do edit photos and video on a 15 year old desktop. yea, it's not as fast. it even still only has mechanical hdd. it works. i really don't give a shit how long it takes to encode. it can sw encode hd h264 in 'real time' (sw giving better quality output and at a smaller file size than the faster gpu encoding), that's good enough for me. it does everything the much newer system i've been able to use recently at the office can do--it's just slower at some things.
My 2007-era desktop was perfectly capable as an HD video editor and streaming server. Anything worth a shit in the Desktop space since round-about 2010 has been decent at on-the-fly transcoding as well.
Your incredulity is astounding to me. The Xbox 360 and PS3 were both perfectly capable as streaming players, way back in 2006. The PC's of that era were more powerful, not less, and avoiding emulation or discrete gpus are some of the main reasons those consoles used PowerPC. They wanted a more compact solution
The media in their day, which was often HD 1080P (more realistically 720P, but that's mostly down to what screens were available - not a restriction the PC hardware suffered from). Still the majority of TVs and monitors being sold are 1080P, or even 720P, yet 1600x1200 monitors, and the hardware that could drive them, were out in the ninetees.
Don't neglect that PCs were juggling multiple apps(and monitors) at these resolutions by the late ninetees as well, and dedicated mpeg encode/decode was not at all uncommon. It was part of the MMX instruction set for Pentium CPUs, including the Pentium that came in my 2001-era Gateway the government gave me more or less for free.
The mid-aughts were not some ancient land of techno-boredom and tech mediocrity. This current future we find ourselves in is just extra pathetic when you hold up the bullshit we've accepted in exchange for pitiful technological progress(for you or I), versus what we already had twenty years ago. The main differences now are truly down to power consumption and portability, although the iPhone came out in 2007, and my color PalmPilot played video well in 2003(limitations were, yes, storage, and slow wifi)
1999: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/779230
Edit: just (re-)read your bit about how capturing greater than 420P video was impossible. My wedding in 2007 was recorded in 720P.