I think this conflates "old" with "killed". Most of the stuff is just old.
I would say the Mac Pro was "killed", left to languish after the trashcan model, then isolated from third party GPUs when it finally got upgraded to Apple Silicon, and then left to languish again until the lack of sales justified killing it.
Rosetta 2 will certainly deserve a spot on this list next year when they start yeeting it, an amazing piece of technology that has made Apple Silicon-era Macs uniquely capable of executing the widest range of software.
I think it's important to highlight Apple's mentality: That old devices are dead to them, and their pretending they don't even exist anymore.
I have a house full of Apple hardware and none of them get updates from Apple anymore, and I can't manually update them without hackery (OpenCore) or wiping them to install Linux (where possible). Also, because third party app developers largely align with Apple's philosophy, less and less 3rd party software even works on my computers anymore. Heck, even Homebrew, which ships open source software that has always run on my devices, relegates my hardware into their "tier 3" garbage can[1].
The combination of Apple's and third party's disinterest counts as "killed by Apple" in my book.
> Also, because third party app developers largely align with Apple's philosophy, less and less 3rd party software even works on my computers anymore.
I think it's more about 3rd party app developers attempting to improve their products and stay relevant.
If Apple releases a new framework or API that would make a developer’s app better, but it requires macOS 14 or later, are they not supposed to incorporate it?
I've noticed lots of 3rd party developers keep older versions of their apps available for older macOS versions.
Apple could easily support eGPUs if they wanted to, but they choose to have vertical integration over fragmentation or usefulness. It's the same as them not supporting OpenGL or Vulkan: they could if they wanted to be a better gaming/porting target, but compatibility of any sort is not a priority.
Agreed. Aside from obsolete hardware that was replaced with newer products, there isn’t really anything on this list that I miss except for HyperCard. Just about everything worthwhile became another product or got rolled into something else.
I came here to comment the same. I'm still using my iphone SE 2nd gen and it's still receiving software updates. Calling it dead is a bit misleading imo.
I think so, Macs can run software written for Android, iOS, Mac, Windows and Linux, everything else is incapable of running the iOS and Mac stuff. Virtualizing macOS from a Linux or Windows sucks for arbitrary reasons, and both macOS and iOS are missing a compatibility shim like WINE.
All this sounds great in theory, but Mac does not have a particularly stable ABI and it's fairly common for closed source software from 5+ years ago to just not run.
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.
I read some of it as interesting "quick fails" - Apple's BNPL, for instance - I see why they would have tried, and it's interesting that they pivoted relatively quickly out of it.
Some of the text is silly sour grapes, but it always will be with editorial content about tech products.
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)
Apple has done a much better job at maintaining their stuff compared to Google. Even this list is mostly just old hardware that fell out of service.
And even then, I can still sync my 20+ year old firewire ipod with the most recent Apple Music (formally iTunes) on my m4 MacBook with the right converter.
Well, even looking at the list it's clear that there's huge difference between things killed by apple and by google. E.g. there's lots of hardware for which there's just no genuine market, e.g. iPod touch. I'm surprised it was killed only in 2022. Lots of software was just incorporated into other products. It's completely different compared with what google does.
unfortunately they hold it in the wrong direction. At least when it comes to updates and feature retention apple is one of the leaders. Even this website posted here shows that most of the software stuff is just rolled into other native apps instead of being abruptly cancelled (lookin at you google) with no recourse where to go.
Why is Apple Watch series 0 even listed? I can _sort of_ see the argument for discontinued form factors generally even though I'd disagree with it being useful to show, but series 0 wasn't a different form factor even.
Some of these are like "Find My Friends" which is still a thing, but like the website mentions, was just folded into the Find My app. It's not like Google killing popular services like Reader or trying and failing to get another messaging app off the ground
Time Capsule ( for iOS ), AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express, WebObjects, Safari for Windows, XServe, Aperture.
These are all the stuff I miss and I wish they would come back.
On iPhone Air, currently at 6.5" gets a Silicon Carbon Battery upgrade, I hope we also get iPhone Air Mini at 5.95". The current iPhone Air still sold better than iPhone Plus. It should continue to stay in the product line.
This list can't be serious. Is there single thing on this list that was genuinely killed by Apple, and not just outdated or moved to be a part of other software?
I'd consider the functionality Aperture held to have been killed. I used it for years after 2015 due to a lack of a functional replacement that wasn't a subscription.
It still find myself missing what seems to be basic capabilities while using Photos.
Jefferson and Read had sold a scripted series to Apple titled Scraper that was based on the inner workings of Gawker, and the quartet, along with a handful of, as Carmichael puts it, “very accomplished, amazing screenwriters and playwrights on Broadway,” were producing scripts for the first season. [...] “Max and I had been concerned about that when we sold the project to Apple,” says Jefferson, but the executives developing the project “told us there was a very protective firewall between the TV side and the tech side.” But a month before the writers room wrapped with scripts for the first season’s eight episodes, Jefferson recalls, “an executive called me and said word had reached Tim Cook that we were doing a show set in a world similar to Gawker, and he had put the kibosh on it personally.” Jefferson and his 3 Arts Entertainment manager Jermaine Johnson (who also represents Read and Carmichael) say they heard about but never saw an email in which Cook allegedly referred to Gawker as rife with “vile human beings.” (Cook did not respond to requests for comment.)
The only thing missing i could find was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashcode which had a pretty great data binding UI that i never quite saw like that.
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.
Like by 2010 you only burned CDs for the stuff what couldn't accept the flash drives ie mostly for the car audio systems. And by 2015 the need for ODD just disappeared though they were still included in servers and desktop PCs out of habit. But by 2020 a 'desktop' PC became SFF/USFF/USDF and you couldn't mount ODD there even if you want (though Lenovo sold mounting bracket for ODD for their Tiny series).
I think the website would benefit of listing the lifespan regarding support rather than when it stop selling the device. Right now, it lists the Homepod 1st Gen had a lifespan of 3 years, but mine is still receiving updates regularly.
I don't know your definition of "rolled in", but the actual successor to the SE is the e line (iPhone 16e, 17e, etc).
I agree that the SE was a great iPhone and a great form factor. I didn't have one, but my kid did. Whenever I had to do something on their SE, I found it so much more usable than my own whatever Pro phone of that time. It wasn't enough to get me to go to an SE, however.
I guess that's Rosetta 2, and TFA is referring to Rosetta 1.
But don't worry, Rosetta 2 is also on the chopping block:
> Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
tl;dr: Rosetta is sticking around through macOS 27. After that, the normal Rosetta will be removed from macOS. but a subset of Rosetta will remain to support certain older unmaintained games.
For people complaining about the quality of the entries of the page, I would encourage you to take a look at the often-cited on this very site https://killedbygoogle.com/ and compare. There we have things like Dopple, "Killed recently, Doppl was an early experimental AI app launched by Google Labs in June 2025 to create a "digital twin" or virtual model of yourself for trying on outfits. It was 10 months old."
The quality of entries on killed by apple seems largely comparable if not higher.
I wish they'd bring those back so simple and easy to set up. Could use some more functionality like VPN's and such but otherwise a great product line-up. Now it seems every AP looks like an alien spacecraft.
Dark Sky is the one that most grinds my gears. It was one of those unique apps that does something miraculous. Apple bought it and killed it for everybody that didn't use an iphone.
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.
I mean it's not as offensive as a lot of other vibe-coded "products", but it's just kind of a waste of everyone's time; there's no ingenuity in the presentation (it suffers from the same emoji-feature-box-small-text combo as every single one-shot vibecoded site in existence) and judging by said presentation I highly doubt the author put the effort into researching this list or writing the comments by themselves either.
So while it's not gonna be the next Moltbook in terms of security breaches, it's basically just the 2026 version of your middle manager copy-pasting a paragraph from ChatGPT web into Slack. It's content from nobody for nobody. It's definitely not what I want to see on the HN front page, but I guess if people get a kick out of it then you do you.
Good. Apple users are a minority in my local community, yet the vast majority of broken charging ports over the years have been Lightning. Some micro-USB, and zero USB-C problems so far.
I think this conflates "old" with "killed". Most of the stuff is just old.
I would say the Mac Pro was "killed", left to languish after the trashcan model, then isolated from third party GPUs when it finally got upgraded to Apple Silicon, and then left to languish again until the lack of sales justified killing it.
Rosetta 2 will certainly deserve a spot on this list next year when they start yeeting it, an amazing piece of technology that has made Apple Silicon-era Macs uniquely capable of executing the widest range of software.
I think it's important to highlight Apple's mentality: That old devices are dead to them, and their pretending they don't even exist anymore.
I have a house full of Apple hardware and none of them get updates from Apple anymore, and I can't manually update them without hackery (OpenCore) or wiping them to install Linux (where possible). Also, because third party app developers largely align with Apple's philosophy, less and less 3rd party software even works on my computers anymore. Heck, even Homebrew, which ships open source software that has always run on my devices, relegates my hardware into their "tier 3" garbage can[1].
The combination of Apple's and third party's disinterest counts as "killed by Apple" in my book.
1: https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers
> Also, because third party app developers largely align with Apple's philosophy, less and less 3rd party software even works on my computers anymore.
I think it's more about 3rd party app developers attempting to improve their products and stay relevant.
If Apple releases a new framework or API that would make a developer’s app better, but it requires macOS 14 or later, are they not supposed to incorporate it?
I've noticed lots of 3rd party developers keep older versions of their apps available for older macOS versions.
Apple could easily support eGPUs if they wanted to, but they choose to have vertical integration over fragmentation or usefulness. It's the same as them not supporting OpenGL or Vulkan: they could if they wanted to be a better gaming/porting target, but compatibility of any sort is not a priority.
Right. Like the Lightning Connector and Apple SIM, replaced by USB-C and eSIM. It's like saying ISA slots were "killed by Intel."
Agreed. Aside from obsolete hardware that was replaced with newer products, there isn’t really anything on this list that I miss except for HyperCard. Just about everything worthwhile became another product or got rolled into something else.
Macbook 12" was the best form factor computer ever.
Size, not form.
Best form goes to the Neo, current Air, or 2015 MBP.
They should be offering a 12” Air now.
I came here to comment the same. I'm still using my iphone SE 2nd gen and it's still receiving software updates. Calling it dead is a bit misleading imo.
> widest
wider sure, but widest?
I think so, Macs can run software written for Android, iOS, Mac, Windows and Linux, everything else is incapable of running the iOS and Mac stuff. Virtualizing macOS from a Linux or Windows sucks for arbitrary reasons, and both macOS and iOS are missing a compatibility shim like WINE.
All this sounds great in theory, but Mac does not have a particularly stable ABI and it's fairly common for closed source software from 5+ years ago to just not run.
[delayed]
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.
I read some of it as interesting "quick fails" - Apple's BNPL, for instance - I see why they would have tried, and it's interesting that they pivoted relatively quickly out of it.
Some of the text is silly sour grapes, but it always will be with editorial content about tech products.
BNPL is kind of back for apps subscriptions, but not in the US for some reason.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/27/app-store-monthly-subsc...
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)
Apple has done a much better job at maintaining their stuff compared to Google. Even this list is mostly just old hardware that fell out of service.
And even then, I can still sync my 20+ year old firewire ipod with the most recent Apple Music (formally iTunes) on my m4 MacBook with the right converter.
A lot of the Software listed is just stuff the has a new name or merged into another piece of software now too.
iTunes -> Apple Music
Apple TV Remote App -> Apple TV Remote in Control Center
Dashboard -> Desktop Widgets
Find My Friends -> Find My
iPhoto -> Photos
Game Center app -> Games/Apple Arcade
Newsstand -> Apple News
iChat -> iMessage
Final Cut Studio/Server -> Final Cut Pro
AppleTalk -> AirDrop
as just a few examples.
Well, even looking at the list it's clear that there's huge difference between things killed by apple and by google. E.g. there's lots of hardware for which there's just no genuine market, e.g. iPod touch. I'm surprised it was killed only in 2022. Lots of software was just incorporated into other products. It's completely different compared with what google does.
Right. Like, Apple sold a DVD drive until 2024?
unfortunately they hold it in the wrong direction. At least when it comes to updates and feature retention apple is one of the leaders. Even this website posted here shows that most of the software stuff is just rolled into other native apps instead of being abruptly cancelled (lookin at you google) with no recourse where to go.
Google killed more messenger app/services than the entire software count listed in this list. Obviously exaggerating but might be close to true
Why is Apple Watch series 0 even listed? I can _sort of_ see the argument for discontinued form factors generally even though I'd disagree with it being useful to show, but series 0 wasn't a different form factor even.
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.
Or acquisitions where they immediately killed the product... RIP FingerWorks TouchStream
I've never heard of that product but man, that's an... unfortunate name.
RIP lala.com
Some of these are like "Find My Friends" which is still a thing, but like the website mentions, was just folded into the Find My app. It's not like Google killing popular services like Reader or trying and failing to get another messaging app off the ground
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).
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.
Aperture is the only Apple software I miss. Sometimes I feel they killed 32bits app too soon
A lot better than Google’s track record:
https://killedbygoogle.com/
A more interesting list of products that Apple still supports in someway or there other: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772
that is perhaps the Nobel Prize in Clickbait Titles winner for 2026, and it's only May. Well done (not kidding...it's clever)
It's a riff on https://killedbygoogle.com/
But killing a service is something completely different then discontinueing hardware or interface standards. A lot here is still well supported.
This page could have used some heavy editing after asking the LLM to compile all stuff from wikipedia.
Lost it at the Lightning listing, which apple still first party even:
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/muqw3am/a/lightning-to-us...
oh that's fun. had not seen that before: thanks.
Time Capsule ( for iOS ), AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express, WebObjects, Safari for Windows, XServe, Aperture.
These are all the stuff I miss and I wish they would come back.
On iPhone Air, currently at 6.5" gets a Silicon Carbon Battery upgrade, I hope we also get iPhone Air Mini at 5.95". The current iPhone Air still sold better than iPhone Plus. It should continue to stay in the product line.
This list can't be serious. Is there single thing on this list that was genuinely killed by Apple, and not just outdated or moved to be a part of other software?
I'd consider the functionality Aperture held to have been killed. I used it for years after 2015 due to a lack of a functional replacement that wasn't a subscription.
It still find myself missing what seems to be basic capabilities while using Photos.
iphone mini. sure you could argue nobody wants it. i agree most other things there were just old, renamed, folded into sth else or obsolete etc.
Lightning Connector was not killed by Apple though. Not really.
Maybe add the TV series "Scraper"?
At Gawker, They Battled a Billionaire. 10 Years Later, the Scars Are Still Healing https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/inside-ga...
Jefferson and Read had sold a scripted series to Apple titled Scraper that was based on the inner workings of Gawker, and the quartet, along with a handful of, as Carmichael puts it, “very accomplished, amazing screenwriters and playwrights on Broadway,” were producing scripts for the first season. [...] “Max and I had been concerned about that when we sold the project to Apple,” says Jefferson, but the executives developing the project “told us there was a very protective firewall between the TV side and the tech side.” But a month before the writers room wrapped with scripts for the first season’s eight episodes, Jefferson recalls, “an executive called me and said word had reached Tim Cook that we were doing a show set in a world similar to Gawker, and he had put the kibosh on it personally.” Jefferson and his 3 Arts Entertainment manager Jermaine Johnson (who also represents Read and Carmichael) say they heard about but never saw an email in which Cook allegedly referred to Gawker as rife with “vile human beings.” (Cook did not respond to requests for comment.)
The only thing missing i could find was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashcode which had a pretty great data binding UI that i never quite saw like that.
I’m still waiting for another small form factor iPhone like the iPhone 13 mini before I upgrade. I find it a lot more ergonomic to use
What does it mean for Apple to have "killed" the iPhone X?
> 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.
Was too puzzled by SuperDrive inclusion.
Like by 2010 you only burned CDs for the stuff what couldn't accept the flash drives ie mostly for the car audio systems. And by 2015 the need for ODD just disappeared though they were still included in servers and desktop PCs out of habit. But by 2020 a 'desktop' PC became SFF/USFF/USDF and you couldn't mount ODD there even if you want (though Lenovo sold mounting bracket for ODD for their Tiny series).
I think the website would benefit of listing the lifespan regarding support rather than when it stop selling the device. Right now, it lists the Homepod 1st Gen had a lifespan of 3 years, but mine is still receiving updates regularly.
This is a deeply unserious list of things that were just updated to newer versions or made obsolete.
Truly, the SE was a great phone. It was not really "rolled in" to future phone models; it just ended.
I don't know your definition of "rolled in", but the actual successor to the SE is the e line (iPhone 16e, 17e, etc).
I agree that the SE was a great iPhone and a great form factor. I didn't have one, but my kid did. Whenever I had to do something on their SE, I found it so much more usable than my own whatever Pro phone of that time. It wasn't enough to get me to go to an SE, however.
I just want to say Rosetta is still around, it's just not PPC -> Intel anymore. Required for Serato DJ to work as recently as a year or so ago.
I guess that's Rosetta 2, and TFA is referring to Rosetta 1.
But don't worry, Rosetta 2 is also on the chopping block:
> Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...
Citation: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...
tl;dr: Rosetta is sticking around through macOS 27. After that, the normal Rosetta will be removed from macOS. but a subset of Rosetta will remain to support certain older unmaintained games.
Forgot to mention John Sculley's reputation.
And Michael Spindler’s mental health. https://lowendmac.com/2013/michael-spindler-peter-principle-...
Apple killed its soul. I was a happy Apple user around the time of the Apple ][. From there it went downhill.
I dunno, I hated how the Apple ][ forced a case on you. Had more choice before.
The market seems to think otherwise, though?
I'm surprised so many people are ok with not owning the device they paid for, and with being nannied by Apple all the time.
But I know, I'm not the target audience anymore.
This list includes some things that were killed then brought back. Seems unfair.
For people complaining about the quality of the entries of the page, I would encourage you to take a look at the often-cited on this very site https://killedbygoogle.com/ and compare. There we have things like Dopple, "Killed recently, Doppl was an early experimental AI app launched by Google Labs in June 2025 to create a "digital twin" or virtual model of yourself for trying on outfits. It was 10 months old."
The quality of entries on killed by apple seems largely comparable if not higher.
RIP to Lala -- I fondly remember listening as much music as I could exactly once
Still love my Apple Airport Extreme APs. They just work.
I wish they'd bring those back so simple and easy to set up. Could use some more functionality like VPN's and such but otherwise a great product line-up. Now it seems every AP looks like an alien spacecraft.
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.
that's a laughably small list for a company the size of apple
My general impression is that Google is more fickle, but just the same I don't think this is a complete list
Not just fickle but their kills impact more.
No floppy disk. I guess they didn’t actually kill it with the iMac but they certainly facilitated its death.
i'll never forget Nothing Real / Apple Shake
Dark Sky is the one that most grinds my gears. It was one of those unique apps that does something miraculous. Apple bought it and killed it for everybody that didn't use an iphone.
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.
Wow another vibeslopped website on the front of Hacker News, how original!
I'd argue a good use of vibeslop -- a non security critical, fun, UI-centric data presentation website, don't be so cynical :)
I mean it's not as offensive as a lot of other vibe-coded "products", but it's just kind of a waste of everyone's time; there's no ingenuity in the presentation (it suffers from the same emoji-feature-box-small-text combo as every single one-shot vibecoded site in existence) and judging by said presentation I highly doubt the author put the effort into researching this list or writing the comments by themselves either.
So while it's not gonna be the next Moltbook in terms of security breaches, it's basically just the 2026 version of your middle manager copy-pasting a paragraph from ChatGPT web into Slack. It's content from nobody for nobody. It's definitely not what I want to see on the HN front page, but I guess if people get a kick out of it then you do you.
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.
That is also the case for many of the products on the Google killed by lists.
Ever heard of killedbygoogle.com?
> Lightning Connector
Good. Apple users are a minority in my local community, yet the vast majority of broken charging ports over the years have been Lightning. Some micro-USB, and zero USB-C problems so far.