End of Support for Apple Products

Nanoman's Company began phaseout of support for Apple products on 2018-10-06. If you're wondering how this might affect you, please read this page.

Reasons for Modifying Tools

Every day, people present us with problems, hoping that we can provide them with solutions. Their problems can generally be categorized into one or more of the following scenarios:

• They have the tools to solve their problem, but they don't know how to use them. Our solution will typically be to show them how to use these tools, and if there's anything we can feasibly do to make these tools more intuitive, we probably will.
• Their tools aren't working the way that they expect. Sometimes this is because there's something wrong with their tools, and sometimes their tools need to be modified to meet their requirements, but whatever the case, it's our job to get these tools working as desired.
• They don't have the tools that they need. Regardless of whether or not they know what they need, it's our job to advise them of what we believe to be the best solutions, and to get these tools working accordingly.

In each of these scenarios, to best serve our customers, we'll sometimes need to modify tools that were made by other people. If any of these tools were made by people who designed them to prevent modifications by others, then it can be difficult or impossible for us to use these tools to provide our customers with what we believe to be the best solutions, so we'll have to recommend alternative tools to ensure our customers' satisfaction.

Apple Preventing Tool Modifications

Apple is notorious for making tools that are designed to prevent modifications by others. Here are a few examples of how they do this:

• Closed-source software. While some of Apple's software has been released as open-source, all of it hasn't, and these closed-source components can cause problems for modifying software, which is by far the most common type of modification that our customers require.
• Tamper-resistant hardware. Apple doesn't want anybody else to be able to repair, upgrade, or modify their hardware, and they've invested a lot of time and money into making work unnecessarily difficult for third-party support providers. Examples include their T2 chip, excessively proprietary designs, hiding screws under magnets, et cetera.
• Vendor lock-in. For example, if you have an iOS device and want to make a backup of its contents, then your only options are iCloud or iTunes. If you don't trust iCloud and/or can't justify its cost, and if iTunes is incompatible with your computer, then you probably can't backup your data from your iOS device.

Compared to Microsoft products, we've found Apple products to be significantly more reliable and more efficient, so from 2007 until 2014, we suggested Apple computers as a solution to escape from Microsoft. Since 2014, however, all the tools that our customers require except iTunes are available for UNIX computers, and because iTunes isn't required for anything other than non-iCloud backups of Apple's iOS products, we no longer have any reason to suggest Apple products as a solution for anything.

In 2018, after we learned that Apple designed their T2 chip to prevent anybody else from servicing their hardware, we decided that it was time to end our support for Apple products. For several reasons, we greatly dislike supporting Apple products, and because Apple has made it very clear that they don't want support from other people, we opted to oblige.

Apple Support Phaseout

On 2018-10-06, Nanoman's Company began phasing out support for Apple products. If you own an Apple product that we've serviced in the past, then provided your support requirements are feasible, we'll continue to offer support for it, but for only as long as you own it. If you replace an Apple product with another Apple product, we won't support its replacement, and if you transfer your Apple product to someone who isn't a customer of ours, then our support for it will probably end.

Please note that we have no plan to ever prevent users of Apple products from accessing any other products or services. For example, if we maintain a server that you want to access using an Apple product, then we'll continue to offer the details of the protocols that you can use to access this server, but we won't help you with configuring the Apple product to use these protocols.

Support from Apple can be considerably more expensive than what our customers have typically paid for support from us. If you're adamant about using an Apple product that we won't support, then before you acquire it, you should investigate the total cost of the various types of support that you might require during the time that you plan to use it.

When we began this phaseout, only a small minority of our customers had previously solicited our support for Apple products, so we didn't expect this policy change would very negatively impact our business or our customer base. In fact, the time that we've spent supporting Apple products has siphoned time that we could have spent improving UNIX products, so we expect that this policy change will have significant long-term benefits for our company and our customers.