I've asked multiple people, in multiple places, the same thing, and I have yet to get an answer!

I'm completely baffled, and I'm a daily LLM user!

Very interesting interview, thanks for sharing. Amazing that that goes back to 2005.

(Also of minor interest that both Eric Schmidt and Charlie Rose were accused of being sex pests, with legal proceeding still or recently ongoing.)

I'm happy that (until relatively recently) adventure was still bundled with FreeBSD installs. It's a pkg today.

Ken Williams, formerly of Sierra Entertainment, oversaw the production of a 3D remake just a couple of years ago. I've never played it, but it seems to get decent+ reviews.

So, you jump into a thread specifically about Apple supporting old devices but next you say "numbers are irrelevant" when they don't match your narrative. You make bombastic claims like "if we stop bending over for them, we can bring them to heel. They should not be allowed to abandon devices they could easily support when any significant number of people are still using them" but won't even attempt to articulate what your demand actually is. Seemingly, supporting 11+ year old devices and 5 major OS revisions is not sufficient. Forget Apple, if that gets your dander up, support is an issue for almost all developers.

Your statement has real costs that must be born by someone. Supporting more than a decade of devices (with multiple device releases each year) and five OS revisions (and maintaining build systems, testing systems and staff, etc.) is not a simple operation.

Regulations are very easy to impose through anti-corporate diatribes, when you ignore costs and consequences.

Apple was the context of the other post, but you were modded down for a stupid comment and not because of anything about Apple.

I'm still curious to see your answer.

Sure, since you missed it in my post, here's what I already asked you:

From your post, directly replying to OP about Apple, it's clear that you believe Apple is egregiously guilty of breaking your rules and "we [need to] stop bending over for them, we [need to] bring them to heel." (Nice.) Apple currently supports 11+ years of devices and 5 major OS software revisions. Well under 1% of iOS users are running something that is not currently supported.

So, what can Apple "easily support" that they are not currently supporting, and define exactly for the purposes of your rule what "any signfigicant number of people" is.

We're on the same page. Enshittification is kind of unavoidable because the vast majority of people go along with it. I'm sure I do too, in ways that I'm not criticizing!

I pirated software when I was a kid. As an adult today I buy licenses to free software, subscribe to patreons or substacks of people who produce content I use or follow, etc. It's not a ton, but I try to do my part to support individuals.

With the Spruce Eats example, it's not absolute junk. I'm sure some recipes on that site are great. But they are loaded with SEO junk, and Spruce Eats is owned by People mag that also owns All Recipes, Southern Living, Food & Wine magazine, etc. My longtime favorite cooking site was Serious Eats--and it sold to People magazine in 2020.

There are efficiencies to this situation, and it's certainly more profitable for People to not have competition, but the end result is bland, corporate, annoyingly SEO-packed, and it makes Serious Eats, All Recipes, Food & Wine, Spruce Eats, etc., all feel the same.

And yeah, everyone, self included, is complicit. It's not purelty a regulatory problem.

The person who posts 24/7 on Slashdot complaining that a stupid opinion didn't get modded up? Uh, you must new here?

According to Apple, as of February 2026, 90% of all currently running iOS devices are on either iOS 26 (current release) or iOS 18 (previous release), while 10% are running something earlier.

iOS 15, 16, and 17 covers ~10% of all iOS users and are all actively patched for security bugs. (Presumably there is a tiny fraction of people running something before iOS 15.)

iOS 15 supports iPhone 6s devices first released in 2015.

So, Apple is supporting their iPhone hardware for at least 11 years right now.

Now, how much further would you, Drinkypoo, force them to make updates for? Should it go all the way back to iOS 1 in 2007? Sure, only a few hobbyists may be running those devices, but what does that matter. Does your dictat apply to all companies that release software packages? Should every company that has ever released a piece of software be forced to patch _every revision level_, separately, forever? How do you define what they could "easily support" and "any significant number of people"? I'm really curious how you imagine your system working. It sure sounds like it would put a lot of small and open source developers out of business.

Right back at you--I agree with you. It's a scary loop. I hated the Google Gemini popup at the top of search results, and yet, recently, I'm finding myself using them.

I'm terrified of the day when ads are 100% generated on the fly for the viewer's exact demographic and likes and dislikes. I'm sure that's coming. Talk about dystopian..

Yes, AI slop has accelerated a lot of enshittification, but the enshittification started decades ago.

It started when Facebook and other major social media aggregators started putting content behind walls and made searching old content extremely difficult.

It started when Google pagerank started being actively abused by SEO "experts" churning out meaningless, contentless blog posts and other junk content just to fluff up rank.

It started when every error message you search for leads to a enshittified page that exists solely to capture common searches, lead you along for as long as possible while displaying as many ads as possible, without any real content.

I used to be able to search for recipes and fine a lot of individual bloggers and websites. IF you search for any given receipe today, there are a handful of sites that are going to pop up at the top of search results for almost everything. Damn you Spruce Eats!

Etc.

I could keep going. The biggest problem is that the EXISTING, in-progress enshittification, is 100% compatible with AI slop.

We're seeing this play out today. There are whole segments of the Internet engaged in arguing over whether Netanyhu is dead, maimed, in hiding, whatever, and whether his proof of life videos are AI slop or not. E.g.: https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-dead-tel-aviv-flattened-ai-generated-videos-are-dominating-the-iran-war/

I don't feel that I can correctly identify all forms of AI content anymore. For months the AI slop ads were super easy to catch. I feel like I haven't seen as many recently. I'm assuming this means I'm just not identifying them as AI generated.

Likewise for video.

When I got to college, late 90s, one of the very first things I did was get my computer hooked up to campus ethernet. I had dialup at home, and it was glorious. A friend who was also just starting at nearby university that was linked to mine with a highspeed connection, called me--on landline--and we just started transferring files back and forth. Maybe via ICQ. It was unbelievable seeing 10MB/s...

Honestly, the next time that I felt anything like that "wow" Internet speed moment was with Google Fiber when my ping from my home server to my office desktop came in at 1.5ms.

Hah! That's going down as one of my favorite clunkers.

Fourth, actually, and the third for Mac OS X / macOS.

1984 - Original Macs, Motorola 68K (Mac OS 8, I believe, was the last to support 68k)
1994 - Transition to PowerPC
2006 - Transition to Intel
2020 - Transition to Apple Silicon

That's pretty funny, and I didn't realize this until just now. Macs were on Intel processors for longer than any other archtecture!

PowerPC to Intel transition worked well with Universal binaries, and that transition set the stage for Intel to Apple Silicon.

Intel to Apple Silicon was almost undetectable by most people, since ARM development for iPhone and iPad and multiple targets development was so seamless by this point.