Dante of the Inferno

And don’t forget the Spin Win game to foster addiction in a demographic known for being especially exploited for addictive behaviors.

It’s mostly the electronics. A cable this long requires active signal management, where both ends of the cable have a chip in the connector head to process and maintain the signals running through. Passive cables have to be shorter in order to preserve to signals without the additional chip needed.

In theory you could have even longer cables, but that would require even more active management. The irony is that Cat6 ethernet cables can run comparable power for up to 100m, but it is data restricted. At these speeds, you are better off with fiber optic cable, but then you could not transmit power.

So really, we are restricted because we want a single cable to do all the things. That said, I personally would still not purchase this cable, because of I were to spend over $100 on such a cable, then I will wait until a similar length is available for the new USB-C 2.1 spec that delivers 240W. I understand it will be a while, but I’m greedy.

The burden of what that developer license does and does not include definitely falls to Apple to communicate. That much I think we can all agree on, which means criticizing Apple to properly communicate (that 2021 photo scanning disaster being another stark example).

However, if people are proposing a completely separate App Store or side loading system just for abandoned, er "complete" software, then we should also establish just how long this stuff should be available for, and no, "forever and a day" is not an acceptable response. Any software, no matter how simple, still relies on various libraries and call sets, which Apple has every right to change, rename, or delete in upper OS versions. Furthermore, as we’ve seen with Microsoft, Windows 7 won’t run on modern Intel chips, and Windows 11 is effectively barred from running on non-TPM-2.0 CPUs. The only reason that abandonware even continues to run on Windows 11, and 10, and 8, and 7, and Vista is because Microsoft hadn’t bothered to strip out the calls which that software relies upon. There’s no guarantee that won’t change with the very next Windows update.

So in order to effectively call upon this abandonware, you still need the OS developer to continue supporting the older code, even if it’s largely vestigial (case in point, Internet Explorer).

And just how long do we expect this to go on for? That guy from my LabView example bemoaned an 11 year permanent license.
Windows itself is almost 30 years old, and some of those original calls are still there, along with that IE mini-engine now embedded in Edge just to keep a bunch of corporate internal sites running on beyond-stale systems.

Like, is that really what users were expecting from literally "internet Operating System?" I ask, because I don’t think any software developer intends, let alone plans, to support anything for…ever, and that doesn’t matter if it’s one human or a trillion dollar company.

Hmmm, that’s an interesting point about apps which perform simple functions. While I would argue that in your case, this is just the cost of doing business on a digital platform which you have no control over, it did speak to larger issues about the business models of these platforms.

In the days of Windows, it was simply expected that the install software was stored physically or on the business’s own server. The concept of App Stores shifted where that software was stored, and if you were actively lucratively developing, then that was fine. However now that landlord wants unproductive tenants out.

May I ask just how long you were planning on keeping that hardware you are running that app on? It’s very possible that you would do so for as long as that device could connect to WiFi. If that seems impractical, then imagine how it would seem if after another few years you decided to, on your shiny new device, go hunting down a (by that point) 12 year old program. More than a few people might look at you funny if you made that complaint out loud.

If it’s just a simple app, then maybe it’s just easier for someone to remake it on the modern architecture.

Just the other day, I heard someone bemoan that their most recent LabView license would switch from permanent to annual. Since the software costs over $3000, that person was decidedly pissed off, because they had used their previous standalone version for like 11 years. $3000 cost for 11 years of business service is pretty damn good return on investment. But that was justified to the user because the software features didn’t seem differentiated enough over that time span to justify paying $3000 over and over again. But to the developer National Instruments, that was a free ride that they could no longer support.

I can why the act of generating and emailing an invoice appears simple enough (and of small enough data) that Apple can and should store it forever. I would disagree, as the scale of the problem over time can become really quite ridiculous.

We think of the internet as keeping a copy of anything forever, but as we’re starting to see, that’s more a quirk of the infrastructure which supports the servers. Windows itself is only able to support the cruft that it does (to the chagrin of many a tech journalistic, might I add) because gigantic companies have tons of ancient software which they themselves are too stingy to rebuild, because they are keeping software which the developers no longer support. The result is that the operating system itself costs space, money, and performance.

You may be right that for people who "need" access to installing abandonware, Android may be the better fix, but the grass is not greener over there. If the developer has a more recent version of their app which does not target your OS version, then Google will simply not allow you to download it at all. The even less ideal fix is an app store like APKMirror, which gives people sideload access to every previous version of every app available. That’s quite powerful, and it has helped me transfer people’s data off of truly old phones. However, we also know that the whole reason this is possible is because something is paying for the dozens of copies of the same app to exist on a server somewhere, and eventually the money runs out.

Calling it abandonware but expecting a non-developer third party to keep that data accessible is just demanding that the problem of actually keeping that data online be shifted from one party to another. It’s a long term ask which is neither ideal nor fair.

So you want Apple to run a museum for applications that it can’t even guarantee will function properly on modern hardware. This is not the kind of curation that I think most people have in mind.

Preservation is one thing, but not in a for-profit marketplace. If these items are really meant to be "completed objects," then it’s up to developers to consider how those objects should exist into the future. Maybe Apple can negotiate some sort of archivist license for its software, although that does run rather counter to the whole "internet operating system."

That said, Apple doesn’t operate a museum, and neither developers nor the wider public should expect it to.