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.

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.

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).

To some of these I say, good riddance.

On the other hand, I spent a lot of time with "iTunes U" as both an engineer on the project and as a user. I was sad to see it shut down. (I made the last code changes to the last version of iTunes U that shipped.)

While on the team, I also did what I could to try to keep iTunes U alive—fight against its pending "sunsetting". The Education team owned iTunes U but we were also trying to find our way with a new app, "Schoolwork". Schoolwork didn't have content like iTunes U—it was more like Canvas. An instructor created assignments with it and then assigned them to their students.

A desperate Hail Mary play I made was to facilitate the bridging of "iTunes U" and "Schoolwork". The idea was that an instructor could assign portions of an iTunes U course within Schoolwork. Links within the assignment would launch iTunes U, take the student to the specific course and then the specific chapter…

I hoped someone might then see what an asset all this free content iTunes U (well, Apple) hosted. (MIT courses on computer science, to name just an example.)

In the end when it was clear we were tilting against windmills trying to keep iTunes U going, I relented and spent time trying to help enable a mechanism that allowed iTunes U content owners to export their courseware to Canvas-style courses. A handful of content owners took us up on that. I don't know ultimately what ever happened to all that content though.

Some of it no doubt ended up on Coursera or similar. But that iTunes U courseware, for the decade or so that it existed, was absolutely free and often top-notch… That will be missed.

And unlike the music, books, movies, the iTunes U content was all free. The most nefarious thing you might try to ascribe to Apple was that they were hoping the free content would somehow sell more iPads…

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.

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.)

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.

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.

You’re mad at the wrong people in this case though. iMessage can do high quality video and images because it’s a separate channel from the telecoms. RCS can now do high quality video and images too because it’s a newer standard and was built for that (and iPhones do support RCS now). But for normal “text” messages using the MMS/SMS systems, your quality is capped by the carriers and the carries have ridiculously (relative to current standards) low size limits. AT&T limits them to 1MB [1]. Verizon limits you to 1.2MB for images and 3.5MB for video [2] and T-Mobile limits you to 1MB for outbound and 3MB for inbound. Low quality is just baked into those paths and there’s nothing Apple (or Google) can do about it other than build parallel messaging systems

[1]: https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1041906/

[2]: https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-14641/

[3]: https://www.t-mobile.com/support/devices/device-troubleshoot...