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macOS Catalina and iOS 13 are free-of-charge for supported devices.

Duet Display's iOS component costs US $9.99.




That's a pretty reasonable price


I agree, but when the alternative is $0 I’m more price sensitive.


Except if your macbook is older than 2016. They deactivated sidecar for macbook older than 2016.

That's how you know Apple don't give a shit about its user base, unless you pay 2500€ every 3 years for a laptop.


I mean, there was a reason for doing so: older Macs don’t support hardware H.265 decoding. It’s not like they disabled it just to spite people.


Why do I need hardware decoding in my Mac in order to render an image on my iPad?

Why is h.264 unusable?

Why is removing a feature better than letting run a bit slow?


> Why is removing a feature better than letting run a bit slow?

If a restaurant runs out of food, there are gonna be some customers who would eat a turd sandwich, as long as they could eat something, but most customers would flip out and demand to know who would think shipping that out of the kitchen was okay.

Now the analogy isn't perfect, but I imagine there's a host of reasons around expectations of support and experience that Apple has no plans on addressing for those cases, and rather than having a lot of time wasted clogging support with something that will just frustrate the average customer regardless, better to leave the few complaints about why they can't have it, since after all, your complaint doesn't cost them a dime in potential support calls. Just a vague feeling like you're not getting everything you want for the price you're paying.

If you've ever been to Disneyland, you can see historically, the park is jam packed with people who have that same frustration, each a paying customer.

If my assumptions on their product calculus is correct, I know which of those options I'd choose, from a business perspective.


That $0 comes with a hidden price tag.


which doesn't matter if you already have an iPad.




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