leonthegod wrote:The intricacies on how it works isn't the problem of the customers. They charged me full price for software updates what won't ever come. It was easy for them to take my money and removing support for devices under 2 years old is bad business. These are the facts, I don't need to understand how their company is ran, I am not CEO. We as the consumers want a working product, they have the MAC PRO purchase page still up, yet it's EOL.
Sure it's the problem of the customers. It's the real world we live in. That is a fact. Welcome to capitalism. AMD/Apple hardware compatibility may be a technically insurmountable problem, it may be a business decision, it may be somewhere in between. Otoy may lose you as a customer, and if it ticks off enough people, the company may develop a bad reputation, lose profitability and ultimately go bankrupt. Business is messy, difficult, and often wildly unfair. If you are really motivated maybe you can work up a class action suit and hasten their corporate demise. I doubt it would succeed, though, if Otoy can prove that the product worked as advertised at the time of purchase. That's their only legal obligation unless otherwise explicitly stated in a contract.
You might want to ask for a refund for the Octane portion of your purchase. That's about all that can be reasonably expected from Otoy, whatever the reason for the AMD situation. The risk of investing early in new tech that winds up going nowhere is part of working in a rapidly changing industry like ours. You took a gamble, which seemed like a reasonable one at the time, but it may not go in your favor. Yes, that undeniably sucks.
I've made quite a few of those gambles over the years, and I've lost several of them. The first few really stung, but it eventually became clear that it's just part of working in this field on the leading edge. My own strategy, developed over the last thirty years, is to be content working comfortably behind that edge. It's just not worth the slight advantage that winning those particularly risky bets might provide. Purchases are based on actual shipping product that can pay for itself in production, not future projections of what might be coming down the line if everything works out. I find that somewhere between one and three years behind the bleeding edge works just fine for the vast majority of clients and projects. A reliable, well understood set of tools may not be flashy, but they also don't crap out unexpectedly when the heat is on, or require lots of additional late-night R & D for each new project.