A Revealing Upgrade

I awoke remembering, “It’s here! The great Apple upgrade day!”

So much newness - MacOS 13 Ventura, iOS 16.1 and - most significantly, iPadOS 16.1 to turn my iPad Pro into something resembling a multitasking desktop machine, with ‘Stage Manager’.

Immediately started an install of iPadOS - that took quite some time, so I went away and upgraded the MacOS machines, or rather, tried to.?Turns out both of these boxen date from 2015 - one is the last model MacBook Pro to have an HDMI port before the latest MacBook Pros remedied that tremendous shortcoming. This machine has been dragged all around the world, used in the majority of my presentations and briefings. But it’s too old, now outside the penumbra of the hardware that Apple wants to keep up to the latest OS. It’s not actually slow, with a multi-core Intel i5 to keep things chugging along, but Apple has deemed it ‘legacy’ hardware, alongside my other machine, a massive, boat-anchory 27-inch iMac with a 5K retina display (gorgeous from day one) and 24GB of RAM. Until last year, this was my main work machine, used for email, presentation development and messaging. Also from 2015, it too missed out.

My hardware has been left behind. ??

By the time I'd learned this, the iPadOS upgrade had finished: that’s when I learned that the Philips Hue app I’ve been using since I first got those lovely colour-controllable bulbs back in 2013 (when doing research for MooresCloud) no longer connects to the Hue Hub.? The spinning wheel, it just spins and spins and spins.?

It could be that all of this has now been subsumed into Apple Home and Matter. My Hue Hub dates from well before Apple Home came onto the scene, and has never worked with Apple Home - nor ever can - but always worked fine with the app on my iPad. Until now.

This morning's upgrades have forced me into another, rather more expensive set of upgrades. First a new Hue Hub, compatible with both Apple Home and my bulbs; then a new Mac Pro laptop - whenever Apple deigns to release their M2-upgraded models; and, finally, at some point in the future, something to replace the iMac desktop machine. That last is least necessary: I moved all of my comms except iMessage to my new-ish studio PC last year, and (despite Outlook being stubbornly Outlook) has gone smoothly. The reason to have a desktop Mac centers around its wonderful ability to manipulate PDFs from within Preview - something I can do from a MacOS laptop just as easily.

I could repurpose that iMac: it would run Windows quite well. But only Windows 10, as it lacks the trusted computing features needed to cross the line into Windows 11. For both Apple and Microsoft, it’s legacy hardware. They might wish that machine had run out of puff - but it has plenty of life left in it. It shouldn’t just go to the tip. It should be well-used, and well loved, for the rest of its days. Yet its future looks like an ever tightening circle of usefulness, because there’s very little love coming from the makers of hardware and software who build their business models around an endless train of is-this-truly-necessary upgrades.