“Apple is about to discontinue repair support for a handful of products as it plans to designate some Apple TV, iPod, and display models as ‘obsolete’ a day before its iPhone event next month,” Jordan Kahn reports for 9to5Mac.
“The products receiving obsolete status include the original Apple TV, the Apple LED Cinema Display (24-inch), Apple Cinema Display (30-inch DVI Early 2007), the 2nd and 3rd generation iPod touch, the 3rd and 5th generation iPod nano, and iPod classic,” Kahn reports. “The products are scheduled to become obsolete early next month — just one day before Apple is expected to hold its press event introducing new iPhones — on September 8th.”
“All of the products become obsolete (or vintage where applicable) across all of Apple’s markets worldwide,” Kahn reports, “and will no longer be eligible for service or hardware support through Apple’s retail stores or third-party service providers.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s hoping the Apple 5K Display (27-inch) debuts September 9th as well!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Bill” for the heads up.]
How can apple release a 5k display when they still don’t have a way to get 5k video out?
With the release of OS X 10.10.3 last Wednesday, Apple has expanded support for high-resolution 4K and even 5K external displays (via 9to5Mac). Most notably, OS X 10.10.3 enables the Retina 5K iMac and 2013 Mac Pro to drive Dell’s UP2715K 27-inch 5K display released late last year. The display requires more bandwidth than is currently supported over a current single DisplayPort/Thunderbolt cable, so it uses a dual-cable solution taking up two ports on the user’s machine.
— MacRumors, April 13, 2015
Still requires hardware.
Actually, the display is entirely software based. It just appears before your eyes when you activate it. Magic huh?
Still won’t power an Oculus Rift, sadly. No Mac can.
A 5K Thunderbolt Display is not technically feasible right now. The iMac has proprietary connections inside to pump all those pixels from the board to the display. We have to wait until the next version of Thunderbolt, which means we’ll all need new Macs.
With the release of OS X 10.10.3 last Wednesday, Apple has expanded support for high-resolution 4K and even 5K external displays (via 9to5Mac). Most notably, OS X 10.10.3 enables the Retina 5K iMac and 2013 Mac Pro to drive Dell’s UP2715K 27-inch 5K display released late last year. The display requires more bandwidth than is currently supported over a current single DisplayPort/Thunderbolt cable, so it uses a dual-cable solution taking up two ports on the user’s machine.
— MacRumors, April 13, 2015
Idiot! Apparently you can’t read the comments above you. You have no answer.
It would be nice if after all the wait they reward us with a 30″ display (6K?). I have three 30″ Apple screens though they are dimming with time.
Thank heavens! I have these old eyes and even the retna (sp) is almost wasted. LOL.
1080 is only for large screen. 😄
It will be with USB-C. Also, the iMac is simply two parallel thunderbolt streams. similar to the old Dual-DVI Macs, except it’s all internal. Yes, it’s proprietary, but it’s nothing that Apple couldn’t do if they really wanted to.
Problem is… Dual port solutions can be glitchy… and while that would have been okay when Apple had lower market share, today they have to get it right the first time and can’t be as innovative as they have been in the past. They still push things forward, but with caution.
There’s USB-C, the protocol, and USB-C, the connector. The USB-C protocol doesn’t have the bandwidth to drive a 5K Retina Display, at least not yet. But Thunderbolt 3 protocol, which will debut with Intel’s Skylake platform, will have the bandwidth. The other great thing about Thunderbolt 3 is that it doesn’t require it’s own special connector. It uses the USB-C connector.
There is no such thing as USB-C the protocol.
Connectors in the USB world are designated by letters. For the vast majority of those connectors, they are 100% independent of the protocols that run over them — USB-C included.
Now, for the protocols, they are designated by numbers (and sometimes sub elements are designated by name). When you say, “The USB-C protocol doesn’t have the bandwidth to drive a 5K Retina Display…”, you must be thinking of USB-3.1 which maxes out at 10 Gbps. Yes, that protocol, almost no matter what you do with it, will not support 5K displays at 60 Hz or higher. By the time you gang several of them together the CPU overhead becomes unwieldy.
USB-C can support all USB protocols, Thunderbolt protocols, and several other protocols.
Thunderbolt 3 will be easier under Skylake, but it will not “debut with Intel’s Skylake platform” (which has, by the way, already debuted!). In a change of plans a while back, Intel decided not to bake TB3 into the Skylake chips. TB3 chips are stand alone chips that can be used with any motherboard design supporting relatively recent Intel or AMD chips.
Yes, it is a more elegant solution with Skylake, but you could relatively easily design a TB3 PCIe board solution that supported TB3 that you could put into even an old 2012 Mac Pro and have it work.
Thunderbolt 3 *can* use the USB-C connector. But it does not have to do so. Other connectors are possible.
Tony,
You are correct ‘if’ the the goal is to pump ‘every’ pixel to an external 5K Thunderbolt Display. However, it would be possible to put the graphic circuitry in the external display and then use the higher level ‘draw’ commands to drive the external display. The graphic chips inside the external display could then interpreter and then carry out the draw commands. This technique would require far less traffic on the Thunderbolt (or USB-C) cable.
Yes, this would make the displays proprietary (I suppose they could al contain circuitry that would allow them to be used on non-thunderbolt computers). But by offloading the graphics processing, Apple could create even larger displays that could be driven by current hardware.
No more iPod classic. 😢
The inexorable march of progress continues…
The last iPod classic (a design last updated in 2009) was already cancelled. This is notification that Apple no longer supports them for repairs. That does not mean the iPod classic suddenly no longer exist in the world, and are suddenly not useful anymore.
There’s a guy selling an adapter that allows installation of a 1TB (that’s ONE TERABYTE) mSATA card (SSD drive) in an iPod classic. Search on “tarkan adapter” for cool info.
Oh. I thought TB stood for tuberculosis. Thx for clearing that up.
I think it’s fun to continue to use these so-called “obsolete” Apple products. I recently put a 64GB compact flash card in a 3rd gen iPod “classic” (from 2003), through a cheap adapter purchased from eBay. That’s the one with all-touch controls (touch wheel and touch buttons that glow orange), before the “click-wheel,” and it only charges over FireWire (not USB).
Why? Because this iPod model has excellent sound, with enough power to drive larger over-ear headphones. And the monochrome display does not need any backlight to be fully readable, even (especially) in direct sunlight. Back when iPods ONLY played audio, they performed that task REALLY well.
I have that same model (purchased 10/17/03) and loved it. Very few people knew what the heck it was when I showed up at my gym with it. Might have to explore that hack.
If you try it, here’s the trick that made it work for me. I could not get it to Restore properly using my Mac. I was ready to give up, but on a whim, I started up my Windows XP virtual machine (with VMware Fusion), where I have iTunes for Windows installed. Using iTunes for Windows, I did a Restore on the iPod with 64GB CF card. And it worked!
I then connected it to iTunes on the Mac. The Mac’s OS can read and write the Windows “FAT” disk format, so it can fully use a Windows-formatted iPod without doing another Restore on the Mac. And it’s been reliable. It shows just under 60GB of available storage (originally 15GB HD).
5K? Think bigger! Don’t think about what Apple hasn’t done yet. Think what could they do in the future. Think positive! If they introduce a big screen it will be at least 8K. It will not be for everyone. It will cost at least 10 grand.
No USB 2.0. Anything else? We’ll see.