Star letter

Our six-year-old granddaughter has been homeschooling using Microsoft Teams. We provided her with an oldish but serviceable 24in iMac running macOS 10.10 (Yosemite), which was working perfectly until a couple of days ago when there was an update of Teams and a message appeared that it now required macOS 10.11 or newer.

I happened to have a MacBook running 10.11 so I downloaded a new copy from the Apple App Store only to find exactly the same message as on 10.10. I checked the Teams support site, which stated that it would only run on the latest macOS and the two previous versions – 10.14 to 10.16. That rules out large numbers of perfectly good Mac computers.

With trepidation, and knowing that 10.11 was the latest macOS that the iMac would support, I spent a happy afternoon, and drank several pots of tea, upgrading the OS. I wasn’t really surprised when, having downloaded a new copy of the program from Apple, the same error message from Teams appeared. The web version of Teams in Safari just hung, but then I saw it was offering an app download direct from the Teams website. I deleted the version from Apple and downloaded the new one. Lo and behold – after a couple of false starts, it worked.

This reflects poorly on both tech behemoths. That Microsoft should issue a version without warning that it stopped an important existing system from working is bad enough, but for Apple to allow a duff version of a key program such as Teams on its App Store is just as bad. There must be lots of children out there relying on secondhand kit for their schoolwork and the industry ought to be making their programs more accessible. Despite being over ten years old, the iMac is a beautiful, well-built machine and it would be criminal for it to be added to the already far too large electronic scrapheap.