...they simply cannot take it upon themselves to deprecate a means of Internet access that is used by a significant number (even if it's only a small percentage) of people.
Why on earth not?
This is the company whose phenomenal resurgence, dating from the return of Steve Jobs, has been marked by the continuous deprecation of things used by significant percentages of its customers: floppy drives, ADB, SCSI, the Motorola 68000 processor family, OS 9 bootability, the PPC processor family, OS 9 emulation, optical drives (MacBook Air and the latest Mac mini), keyboards and removable batteries (iPhone and iPad), etc.
ad nauseum.
You may not like all or even any of these forced obsolescences, but the fact is that Apple, simply,
can discontinue catering to those on dialup. Indeed, they
already have: Macs haven't shipped with internal modems in over five years.
grelber is free to choose not to join the broadband mainstream, but if there's a solution to be found to the dilemma of how to keep a broadband-era Mac up to date with dial-up tools, it won't be induced via sermonizing.
