Comment by dwaite

My estimate is that your lower count of people who could still be using Time Capsule is off by a factor of 20, but we'll continue with the idea that Apple could justify hiring a single engineer to be assigned full-time on the TimeCapsule, starting today.

This hypothetical employee would:

- update the TimeCapsule firmware from using AFP to using a brand new SMBv3 implementation, including both porting and making it "fit" within the constraints of 2013 hardware.

- be designing and implementing a migration system for both the TimeCapsule and the Mac to move to using the new implementation

- be responsible for all security analysis, QA, and documentation for the firmware and migration system

They also need to get it done by the first macOS version that has AFP removed, which will land in developer preview in six weeks and need to be feature complete in about 17 weeks.

If Apple hires a new developer capable of doing that, I don't want them to relegate them to supporting 13 year old hardware. I want them improving things that the majority of users actually need.

And that is the core problem with this sort of argument. Even with infinite money or the infinite possibilities of open source contributions, the availability of talent is still _always_ finite.