Apple Airplay and the Window of Obsolescence

Anytime there's a new operating system, there's somebody who complains. Usually, the new OS “breaks” some older piece of software. Or maybe your printer won't work after the upgrade. Something.

Last week in my New York Times column, I reviewed Apple's new Mountain Lion operating system. It doesn't break much of anything, because it's basically a dressed-up Lion.

But there is an outcry, all right. It's about AirPlay.

“AirPlay does not seem to work on any of Apple's computers much older than one year,” wrote one unhappy reader. “Please have a look at the sea of negative comments mentioning this on Apple's pertinent upgrade download page. The negatives are a resounding thumbs down on this upgrade.”

Well, I'm not sure on that last point - three million people downloaded Mountain Lion in the first four days, a faster adoption than for any other Mac OS in history, and the users have given it a cumulative 4.5 out of 5 stars on the Mac App Store. But the grumbling is real.

AirPlay is a fairly amazing feature. As I described it, “AirPlay mirroring requires an Apple TV ($100), but lets you perform a real miracle: With one click, you can send whatever is on your Mac's screen - sound and picture - to your TV. Wirelessly. … You can send photo slide shows to the big screen. Or present lessons to a class. Or play online videos, including services like Hulu that aren't available on the Apple TV alone.”

Only one problem: AirPlay requires a recent Mac - 2011 or newer. The reason, Apple says, is that AirPlay requires Intel's QuickSync video compression hardware, which only the latest chips include.

Now there are, fortunately, alternatives for older Macs (and older Mac OS X versions). You can read about one of them here. But that software is more complicated, and the video can be choppy.

So there we are: a new OS feature that requires certain hardware, and the Mac faithf ul are not pleased. Not pleased at all.

“So what we have here is decision by Apple to not support a key feature for the majority of their users, for seemingly the sole reason of pushing hardware upgrades,” wrote one reader. “Both of my Macs are under a year old … but I have to wonder, what upcoming features will I lose out on in 18 months' time? That isn't a way to treat faithful fans (or any installed base), and makes the transition from Jobs to Cook look ominous to say the least.”

“10.8 is Apple's most offensive slap at customer loyalty ever,” wrote another.

I appreciate that these readers are unhappy. But it's not AirPlay that's the problem. It's not even Apple that's the problem. (New software features that require certain hardware isn't anything new. When Windows Vista came out, Media Center didn't work unless you had a TV tuner card. The handwriting recognition in Windows works only on PCs' touch screens. And so on.)

No, it's the way the entire computer industry works.

When you look at it one way, the tech industry is about constant innovation, steady progress. Of course some things will become obsolete. Of course there will be new features that your older computer can't exploit.

But if you look at it another way, the whole thing is a scam to make us keep buying new stuff over and over again. A new phone every two years. A new computer every four. Bad for our wallets, bad for the environment.

In AirPlay's case, that window of “obsolescence,” if we're calling it that, was supershort - one year. If you bought your Mac only two years ago, you can't use AirPlay.

What should Apple have done, then? It had this great technology, finished and ready to ship. How could it have avoided this “slap at customer loyalty”? Should it have sat on AirPlay and not released it, to avoid that perception? If so, how long? Three years? Four years?

Or is the problem not with the tech com panies, but with ourselves? Should we just accept that this is how the game is played? That when you buy a new computer, you should buy it for what it does now, and learn not to resent the fact that, inevitably, there will be better, faster, cheaper computers in the future?

It's hard to imagine either of those approaches becoming satisfying, either to the industry players or their customers. So until there's a resolution to this stalemate, the status quo will prevail: upgrade/grumble, upgrade/grumble. On this one, friends, there's no solution in sight.