End of support for OS X 10.4 and 10.5

[Matthew S.]

Why pull support and remove functionality? Why not just drop support -- just stop updating the app but still allow basic functionality? There are still a lot of legacy machines that are still in use and CANNOT upgrade to 10.6, as they are PowerPC based. Yes, old systems still work. Why stop the app from working totally instead of just deprecating support for those systems?

[Chris M.1]

Dear Dropbox,
Thank you for supporting PowerPC Macs for so long. Even when Apple itself had cut us off for many years, Dropbox was still releasing updated clients for our machines, which was greatly appreciated. Naturally, I was very disappointed to learn that you now plan to end support for OSX 10.4 and 10.5, as PowerPC Macs (of course) cannot be upgraded to later versions of OSX. This means that I will no longer be able to use my PowerPC Mac (which I use everyday) with Dropbox, and so I will have to reluctantly search for an alternative service.

If at all possible, please reconsider whether there is any way that you could continue OSX 10.4 support or at least functionality. I hope to remain a Dropbox user for many years to come. Thanks for your fantastic support in the past, and hopefully in the future also!

Chris

[Saul B.]

Found this on corporateofficeheadquarters.com:
Dropbox Corporate Office Headquarters
760 Market Street Suite 1150
San Francisco, CA 94102 USA
Corporate Phone Number: 1-415-986-7057
Customer Service Number: Online Only

Maybe we should all call there and ask if anyone in HQ has even read this forum thread.

[Peter D.5]

Losing this functionality will significantly alter my work patterns and may be the kiss of death for my Dropbox relationship. It is unfortunate because it currently serves me very well. I too recommend Dropbox to others but will have to rethink that as they have chosen to abandon my needs.

[Shel H.]

"Corporate Phone Number: 1-415-986-7057
Customer Service Number: Online Only"

Good idea but..."We are unable to return calls at this time."

For sharing of individual files, I've been very happy with WeTransfer.com

This kind of corporate idiocy is really frustrating. Unfortunately, it's becoming an epidemic. Skype (owned by MS) also pulled the plug on OS 10.5 and earlier, and I discovered the hard way that Apple's latest IOS for iPad has a "security feature" that, if you're unlucky enough to have it kick in, locks the machine and offers NO way to recover your data. According to the Genius Bar, a web forum, and an outside technician,my choices are wipe the hard drive or throw the thing away. And these companies actually expect us to be loyal to them,.

They could all take a good lesson from Carbonite. Carbonite's backup works far more smoothly on 10.6 and newer--but it DOES continue to work on 10.5, though the company no longer supports that version.

[JoshK]

Hi everyone,

We understand this is disruptive to some of our users and that's why we've announced this many months in advance. I’ve read all of your responses and wanted to provide some additional background on why we’re ending support for OS X 10.4 and 10.5.

Supporting these old versions of OS X would come at the expense of improvements for more recent versions of OS X. Allowing people to continue running what would become an old version of the desktop client is not an option because sometimes we must make non-backwards compatible changes to the way the client talks to the Dropbox servers.

Read on for more details…

Continuing to have our desktop client support 10.4 and 10.5 would come at the expense of improving the experience for more recent versions of OS X. The latest versions of several important components (3rd party software libraries) we rely upon no longer support 10.4 or 10.5. These updated versions have important improvements, bug fixes, and additional functionality. It would be a disservice to the vast majority of our Mac users running recent versions of OS X if we did not update to the latest versions of these components.

Several of you have suggested allowing people to continue using the current version of the desktop client (which in time would become an old version of the desktop client). This would not work because from time to time we must make non-backwards compatible changes to the way the desktop client communicates with our servers. For example in the coming months we will need to make a change to how we represent the underlying identifier we use for certain types of folders. This change is needed because Dropbox has become so much more popular than we initially imagined that we’ll need to switch from using a 32-bit identifier to a 64-bit identifier. This is just one example of a breaking change that periodically must be made.

[Jeff T.1]

Dropbox has been a viable alternative for OS 10.4.11 users for a long time, and for that you deserve our thanks. But do we deserve for you to pull the plug? I don't understand why. Surely it's not planned obsolescence. When you have a great product, why cut off some of your customers needlessly? It only upsets some and angers others, and in the long run it hurts us--and you.

[Daniel K.5]

As the publisher of Low End Mac and a daily user of Dropbox on production Macs running OS X 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, and 10.9, I depend on Dropbox to automatically keep work files synced between several different Macs. Using the Web interface is not a practical option when you are updating dozens or hundreds of files daily.

I want to know why Dropbox is dropping support for older Macs that remain in productive use. Is Dropbox making some technical change on May 18 that OS X Tiger and Leopard cannot support? Is Dropbox changing its code base to a development environment that no longer supports OS X 10.4 and 10.5? Or is Dropbox simply pulling the plug on a minority platform?

At lowendmac.com, 12.5% of Mac users visiting the site are using Mac running OS X 10.5 or earlier to do so. This represents tens of thousands of Mac users, most of them on PowerPC hardware that cannot run OS X 10.6, many of them also using Dropbox on newer Macs that run 10.6 and later, and a few only using PPC Macs. In most cases, we have chosen Dropbox because it is compatible across platforms while competing products have left our older hardware behind.

Please explain the rationale behind this decision - and whether there might be some way to continue Dropbox support on our aging - yet still very useful - hardware.

Thank you!

Dan Knight, publisher, LowEndMac.com

[Richard P.]

At lowendmac.com, 12.5% of Mac users visiting the site are using Mac running OS X 10.5 or earlier to do so

Thats a rather skewed figure due to the demographic you expect to be visiting the site.

This represents tens of thousands of Mac users,

That isn't a large user base at all.

I am really wondering why people aren't complaining that Apple have dropped support for them rather than third party vendors...

[Colin W.1]

@JoshK: thanks for being the man to share the reasoning. I get that and see a possible easy way to leave legacy support....
A few old servers, old existing s/w, serve the fixed size (&declining) "original" mode users, the clients would just need to address some form of subnet address which I'm sure a bit of network whizzadry can do - at worst we all move to legacydropbox.com or whatever.
The trick is to gateway between data on these servers and the newstyle supporting new clients - and I can see that is another layer of the version resolution handling that already exists from client A overlapping client B updates - just here A is legacy land and B is main land. I guess that depends on your architecture and hits your 32 - 64 bit ident thunking issue.
Can that not just be all 32 bits codes are treated as 64 bits by with leading zeros and reserving these for files used by the merry band of those with a foot in legacy land.

I'm sure my thoughts are somewhat simplistic and there may be a bit of work but not insuperable. Maybe it could be crowdsource funded...?

As you say, other breakers may roll up in future - but all it needs is a "gateway" solution and, we hope, that can continue.
If not how aboput spinning-off legacydropbox.com with some old servers and code and you are done? keeps the size down and leaves any new to old world issues up to us users... At least there is a future for those that need it then.

[Daniel R.3]

Posted the question on Twitter and got this reply.

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