...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.
You're correct, of course... Apple can deprecate whatever they care to deprecate, and, in fact, I'll bet that if they deprecated toilet bowls in favor of enforced employee regularity they'd still have lines of hopefuls stretching around the block in search of employment.
I've got no issue with modems having gone the way of all flesh; their current niche is too small to expect support from...well, from almost anybody. (Witness the dearth of fax software, which, you can bet, would still be available if enough of a market existed.) Nor have I got any ongoing issues with other technology that Apple has deprecated (OK... Their premature killing of FireWire 400 was an exception.) despite any initial objections I may have raised. Time and technology march on hand-in-hand, and since there's never a clear dividing line between the old and the new, it is inevitable that there'll be major objections to the new prior to its having fully replaced the old.
What I really meant is that I refuse to accept, until, of course, it's rammed down my throat, that Apple's much-vaunted, world-class Customer Support has been reduced to having to tell customers such as grelber who may have their HDs go south on them that their only option is to unplug their Macs, carry them down the road or across town, and borrow somebody's broadband (which
may even require the installation of new software
Edit: if, in fact, there's actually somebody down the road or across town who's got broadband) to d/l a new Lion installation.
I'll be beyond shocked if Apple hasn't got some sort of backup "fulfillment" plan to cover that inevitability.
And that's all my
"simply cannot" translates to...astonishment that Apple may have decided to treat some of its customers so shabbily.
