Killed by Apple

bel8

Many of them are hardware which is understandable. It would be nice, but perhaps hard to do, to have a list of "sherlocked" apps and services.

afandian

They removed the speed and pitch adjuster in QuickTime player, some time in the past decade, I forget when. That was a useful feature to me. It's not on the site, and I don't care _quite_ enough to figure out how to add it. That's the problem with built-in software that "does it all" and crowds out the market for other software. One day it might not do it all. (VLC can do this, but not as simply as I used to be able to).

jjtheblunt

that is perhaps the Nobel Prize in Clickbait Titles winner for 2026, and it's only May. Well done (not kidding...it's clever)

arjie

Reading this, it honestly seems like Apple has keen product insight. Dropping FireWire for TB/USB etc. Killed by Apple but thank god so we can have fewer custom ports. Thank you, Apple.

sunaookami

Wow another vibeslopped website on the front of Hacker News, how original!

andrewmutz

Hacker news holds Apple and Google to different standards, so I doubt this post will get much traction. (I'm still angry about how I must use an iPhone if I want to be able to text high quality video to people I don't know very well)

badgersnake

No floppy disk. I guess they didn’t actually kill it with the iMac but they certainly facilitated its death.

mholm

This has a very different feel than similar pages for other companies. Hardware is still supported if it's within age, most of the software features are just elsewhere and renamed, and some of it is just previous generations of products they currently sell? Usually these pages convey how capricious the parent is, but this just feels like an arbitrary accounting of things Apple has moved or updated, with a few of them not having replacements.

josefritzishere

My general impression is that Google is more fickle, but just the same I don't think this is a complete list

sgt

The whole premise of this site is very negative and pessimistic in nature. Why the emphasis on "killed", rather than "innovated" or "created"? The expectation should not be for products to last for ever. And for each product that happened, more products came after that were inspired by it.

alsetmusic

> Apple USB SuperDrive I dunno, I mean… sigh. There's stuff that deserves to be noticed, like the Mac Pro. The category is a beefy machine with expansion slots and the ability to run so hard that you need massive cooling. Even if the chips have become far more efficient, there's still space for running something so overpowered that you need physics to cool it. They just gave up on this space and it made some people sad (including me, even if I'm no longer that demographic, because I was for two decades). And then there's the thing that just stopped mattering to most people because it wasn't relevant anymore. I remember my father, who used to love making mixed CDs in iTunes, asking why MacOS got worse at burning music CDs. I had to tell him that what he wanted wasn't the thing anymore. I essentially told him that he was "holding it wrong." It felt bad. Was that killed by Apple or did the market just move on? I'd argue the latter. If you want to drive engagement, Killed By Apple isn't a bad name. I think that's basically the sum of the idea and not much else.

languagehacker

RIP to Lala -- I fondly remember listening as much music as I could exactly once

haunter

Aperture is the only Apple software I miss. Sometimes I feel they killed 32bits app too soon

aplthrowaway67

I miss the home button so much. the facial recognition takes far longer and requires that I hold the phone directly in front of my face.

amelius

Apple killed its soul. I was a happy Apple user around the time of the Apple ][. From there it went downhill.

anshumankmr

Forgot to mention John Sculley's reputation.

siva7

that's a laughably small list for a company the size of apple

slantedview

This list includes some things that were killed then brought back. Seems unfair.

causasui

I don't know what it would take to replace my iPhone SE 3. I can't come to terms with the losing the home button and the fingerprint scan auth.

cheesecompiler

i'll never forget Nothing Real / Apple Shake