I have my Plex Media Server running on an old Mac Pro G5 tower. Yeah, it's 10 years old, but for being a media server and file storage/backup solution, it works great. Because of the age of the machine, I'm unable to upgrade it to newer versions of Mac OSX, which really, I've never needed to. I imagine this is the case with a lot of Plex users. Using an older machine as a media server just makes sense and until now has worked great.
However, this morning, I open the web version of Plex on my laptop, expecting to be able to access my media library as normal and receive this message:
"This version of the web app requires Plex Media Server 1.3.0 or higher."
OK, that's fine. I'll just go check for updates and update. Update check doesn't work, so I go to download it directly and find that the new version (that it appears I'm now required to run to take full advantage of new features) is only for OSX 10.9 and newer.
This is a real big bummer. My current server solution works fine and I've never had an issue with it. I understand there's lots of new features being implemented and those may require newer version of OSX, but not even being able to access my media library through the web interface without upgrading (which I can't do without buying a new server) really sucks. I can't imagine I'm the only one with this problem, too as I imagine a lot of Plex users are using an older machine as a server.
Now, I've since figured out how to connect to the server directly and not through the web interface and that the server is still accessible through the desktop app, but I can't help but feeling this is the beginning of the end. I rely on my Plex Media Server on pretty much a daily basis. How soon before all of the apps that I use Plex with (and there's a lot) stop working until I upgrade? This might fall on deaf ears and I doubt there's anything that will be done about it, but just know that this upgrade strategy is going to make life suck for a lot of users.