Killed by Apple (opens in new tab)

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.

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)

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.

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

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

Lightning Connector was not killed by Apple though. Not really.

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

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.

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).

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 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.

Still love my Apple Airport Extreme APs. They just work.

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

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

> 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.

Forgot to mention John Sculley's reputation.

Truly, the SE was a great phone. It was not really "rolled in" to future phone models; it just ended.

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

If anything, this website provides a great track record for Apple. Most of the discontinued products are either ancient or just got rebranded, and many stayed alive way longer than expected (iPod Touches until 2022??!!).

"Clips"? The lightning connector?

To some of these I say, good riddance.

On the other hand, I spent a lot of time with "iTunes U" as both an engineer on the project and as a user. I was sad to see it shut down. (I made the last code changes to the last version of iTunes U that shipped.)

While on the team, I also did what I could to try to keep iTunes U alive—fight against its pending "sunsetting". The Education team owned iTunes U but we were also trying to find our way with a new app, "Schoolwork". Schoolwork didn't have content like iTunes U—it was more like Canvas. An instructor created assignments with it and then assigned them to their students.

A desperate Hail Mary play I made was to facilitate the bridging of "iTunes U" and "Schoolwork". The idea was that an instructor could assign portions of an iTunes U course within Schoolwork. Links within the assignment would launch iTunes U, take the student to the specific course and then the specific chapter…

I hoped someone might then see what an asset all this free content iTunes U (well, Apple) hosted. (MIT courses on computer science, to name just an example.)

In the end when it was clear we were tilting against windmills trying to keep iTunes U going, I relented and spent time trying to help enable a mechanism that allowed iTunes U content owners to export their courseware to Canvas-style courses. A handful of content owners took us up on that. I don't know ultimately what ever happened to all that content though.

Some of it no doubt ended up on Coursera or similar. But that iTunes U courseware, for the decade or so that it existed, was absolutely free and often top-notch… That will be missed.

And unlike the music, books, movies, the iTunes U content was all free. The most nefarious thing you might try to ascribe to Apple was that they were hoping the free content would somehow sell more iPads…

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.

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.

A more interesting list of products that Apple still supports in someway or there other: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

Well, there was a neat feature that Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 had that got killed because the iPhone couldn't do it: you could call and send SMS through integration with a Bluetooth enabled phone. That functionality was then removed, and reintroduced a decade later with great fanfare, but only if you had an iPhone.

I've bought 3 iPhone SEs and am very happy with my decision. There is simply no other phone on the market now that is easy on eyes. iPhones 17 and Pixels are absolutely unbearable. Most LCD Androids switch to some new screens with shimming where they flicker colors to support wider gamut or whatever.

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

This is a deeply unserious list of things that were just updated to newer versions or made obsolete.

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 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'm more interested in the technology they've acquired to kill, like buying up every company making assistive technology for the blind and then destroying them to make their facial unlock feature.

Lots of these items were just moved from the app store into the os. How is that killed? That said, I really miss Dark Sky. Acme weather is good but not quite there yet.

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.

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

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

I'm particularly glad the Touch Bar got "killed by Apple".

What does it mean for Apple to have "killed" the iPhone X?

i'll never forget Nothing Real / Apple Shake

Mac Studio is the Pro. It should have always been. Mini should be Mac. Studio, Neo, Mini et al fall outside of what makes the Mac line up comprehensive to me. iPad Mini is not mini, it's an iPad 8", like... there is an 11/13" ones. And it should have an M chip because Balatro is so sweet on my 11 Pro and chokes on whatever is in the Mini. There should a Pro version of it with Face ID for a hundo more. I like most about the iPad Mini, but give me Face ID and speed and charge me more for a smaller screen, I am tired rotating the damn thing trying to find where the Touch ID button is. WTH is the iPad Air? Pro sans Face ID and some screen stuff? Don't they pay their people well?

PSA - Ford killed the Model T. Big whoop.

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

Hopefully News/News+ will make this list.

> iPhone 5c

> Apple TV Remote app > Apple's official iPhone and iPad app for controlling Apple TV. Pulled from the > App Store after Apple moved the remote into Control Center.

lol

A lot better than Google’s track record:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

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.

> 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.