Dropping native AVCHD support? I'm guessing it could be because there aren't a lot of consumer-aimed camcorders left on the market, and AVCHD was designed for tapeless high-definition camcorders from the mid-2000s until recent years, such as flash-memory camcorders (either internal or SD card), Blu-Ray/HD-DVD camcorders and hard disk drive camcorders (these are now considered "obsolete" mediums by camcorder manufacturers.) It's nowadays mostly prosumers and professionals that use dedicated video cameras, and they are pretty expensive and pack a lot of powerful features (such video cameras are often used to shoot today's big-budget feature films). Consumers would nowadays just shoot video with Smartphones and tablets (including of course the iPhone and iPad) and with digital still cameras, as they can now record video in a much higher quality than they could ten years ago. With that said, later consumer-aimed HD camcorders like my Canon Vixia HF-R600 camcorder even offered the options to record in either MP4 (H.264) or AVCHD formats. The only real advantage of AVCHD in this case is the smaller file size on the SD card, but you can't play back the files outside of the camcorder without importing and/or transcoding it in video editing software first. I shot a few videos on said camcorder in AVCHD, and while the smaller file sizes were nice, I found the MP4 clips I shoot to be more "universal" and easier to import in video editing programs like iMovie, Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Cyberlink PowerDirector, etc. And with the MP4/H.264 files you can even simply drag and drop them in the Finder from the SD card onto your computer's internal drive or an external hard drive/SDD reserved for video work.
