Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina | Hacker News Reader

Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina

thetapedrive.com

223 pointsbookofjoe381 comments

Funny thing about games: most revenue happens soon after release. It's like movies. A game from several years ago usually has low ongoing revenue, so there's little profit in updating it for a new OS. Many Mac games will just die. Especially indies, where the creator might have already moved on. Do you own any nice but not very successful Mac games? They'll die. This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform, compared to Windows which can run decades old games fine.

I'm so happy now that Steam purchases aren't tied to platform and that most gamedevs don't target Mac exclusively. I can just move to PC and keep the games I own. Probably lots of people will do the same.

Only true for the game-as-a-product games. Games that are created as a service are usually soft-launched and increase in revenue after launch (if they're about to be profitable at all).

On the hand, most people stop playing most games pretty quickly after purchase, too. And the good ones often get remade.

So, while this will disappoint some people, I think "destroys the reputation" is a bit much. Many game buyers don't care that much.

Top 2 games being played worldwide in steam right now were made 7 years ago. TF2 was made in 2007 and is still in the top 10. There’s also a huge number of gamers who played older games. In my friends list I’d say roughly half at any given time are imaging non-AA games that are at least 5 years old, and more than half at least regularly play older games.

Going back and playing favourites is an absolutely integral part of gaming as a hobby.

I game on both Mac and PC and I absolutely would abandon gaming on Mac if it stopped supporting older games. Why would I invest in games on Mac if I can’t be sure I can play it later, when I KNOW it’ll work “forever” on PC?

In fact, the move towards internet-based multiplayer action has significantly extended game longevity. In the pre-Internet world, very few games ever achieved the sort of long-running activity you now get almost routinely with any moderately-successful production.

Those games with active revenue streams and playerbases will probably get OS updates.

Does TF2 really count as a game made in 2007? Same for GTAV, WOW etc. These games have all gotten extensive updates, almost nobody is playing the gold master version of these games.

It says more about how some publishers have moved from releasing new games to incremental updates as part of a subscription model than it does about people playing "old" games.

> Does TF2 really count as a game made in 2007? Same for GTAV, WOW etc. These games have all gotten extensive updates, almost nobody is playing the gold master version of these games.

The original Halflife just got a number of security, AI, and other bugfixes.

Does that mean it no longer counts as a game made in 1998?

For the purposes of a discussion about older games not being playable on modern OSes? Yeah, maybe. In fact it could have no code changes whatsoever, but just be recompiled against newer tooling to accomplish that goal.

But I'm talking about games that are getting extensive updates through their lifecycle. It's quite possible that some of these "same" games will be playable in 50 years via slow process of incremental updates. There's no reason to suspect those are any less supporting of modern hardware & OSs than newly released games.

There's already been some unconfirmed talk of GTAV being the last ever GTA, with a hypothetical major update just being a new paid-for area that'll appear in-game one day, as opposed to being a new shrink-wrapped game under a different title like you'd get in the 90s.

> Top 2 games being played worldwide in steam right now were made 7 years ago.

Being "old" is not a problem. Being unmaintained is. I bet that every game in Steam's top-100 list is still being maintained.

And 64-bit support has been available in Macs since 2007. Only games older than 12 years missed the opportunity to use modern tech.

Counter Strike Source looks like will not be updated by Valve. I play it every other day. Is there a petition I can sign?

I imagine quite a few games never get played once bought.

This is kind of pedantic, but I feel like you should specify video games here. Perhaps the consumer home platform personal computer video game market, even.

People have been playing cards, mahjong, chess, and catch greater than a century, so it's not some inherent ephemerality of games that's the problem here.

And even amongst the retro video game market, people are still playing console and arcade games that are decades old.

There's certainly a trend here, but I don't think it's something we should blame on the players.

>This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform

You can't destroy what never existed.

My first thought too. Nobody buys a Mac for gaming. I can't think of any Mac games other than "Myst"

If by “Mac games” you mean Mac-first games… Marathon! Frog blast the vent core, baby.

Also, wasn’t Quake III very briefly a Mac exclusive?

> Also, wasn’t Quake III very briefly a Mac exclusive?

Where the hell did you hear that? In any event, it isn’t true. Quake 3 was released shortly after Jobs was turning them around from circling the drain. They’re lucky somebody was porting it at all.

Maybe he was thinking of Halo? Originally shown at a MacWorld Expo as a Mac exclusive then very shortly thereafter Bungie was bought out by Microsoft (obviously turning it into an XBox exclusive), leading to much outcry among the Mac faithful. But it was never actually released in playable form on the Mac.

...Until much later, ported back from the XBox.

This may interest you.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000229083216/http://macweek.zd...

I think you’re reaching a bit. I’m aware of this. Most of all because what this article doesn’t mention is that q3test was also initially released for Linux before Windows and you better believe that was a huge deal on slashdot at the time. The beta was basically a Mac OS exclusive for 3 days. (I admittedly was quite the Linux fanboy then but even I think calling this a Linux/Mac exclusive for the first “alpha” as they said in the readme silly as compared to something like Myst or Oregon Trail)

It was also like a week and change gap for Windows. And then the later beta releases were Windows only. The final Mac release ended up being delayed until after Christmas.

http://fabiensanglard.net/fd_proxy/doom3/pdfs/johnc-plan_199...

The first public beta of Q3Test was released on MacOS first: https://web.archive.org/web/20000229083216/http://macweek.zd...

Yep for 3 days before Linux! And then most of the later betas were Windows only.

It wasn’t the final full featured release of Quake III though. And as stated in Carmacks .plan it was because these gaming communities were so tiny so I’m not sure this is a strong argument for the macs viability as a gaming platform, which was the context of this thread.

I guess in a technical way that counts as a very brief Mac exclusive..

“MacOS still sucks” lol

http://fabiensanglard.net/fd_proxy/doom3/pdfs/johnc-plan_199...

HaloMD. You can boot into Windows for the rest.

It's really just not the same with the Mac trackpad or magic mouse.

The magic mouse works surprisingly well. Use number 3 on the keyboard instead of the middle button, for say nades.

These are pretty old examples, but Glider (1988) and Escape Velocity (1996) both come to mind.

Yeah the only lost games I really care about here are Crusader Kings, Homeworld remastered, and Escape Velocity/EV Nova.

The last ones sting most because the developer is defunct and those games are definitely never getting remade.

There is a game called Endless Sky, an open source remake of Escape Velocity, it looks similar, but the overall experience is rather far from the original.

Dark castle!

It was getting decidedly better. In particular, if you mostly played indie titles, most of the big ones have supported Mac for a while now. Or, they did.

Right? I regularly play Hollow Knight, Civilization 6, Terraria and some other stuff via Steam. Haven't updated to Catalina yet...

Time to run them in a VM with and old OS the same as older games?

Can you imagine a world where someone who wants to play old Mac games has half a dozen VM containers with different versions of MacOS on them for each game that's compatible with each version?

I can't

This is probably more common than you might think.

I don't play games much, but I do need some software that only runs on Windows, and do this. One VM is Win7, the other is Win10. Neither get network access, so I don't worry about either surveillance or updates.

I also have a VM that runs a really old version of Debian, because I have a couple UPSes that don't support modern ssh.

I suspect we'll also see phone emulation for compatibility becoming more of a thing. Granted, the vast bulk of that software is garbage that nobody cares about, but there are things seeing increasing enterprise use. Someone will go out of business and orphan something people count on at some point.

Realistically, I'd be willing to bet the only old Mac games people are going to want to play are for classic Mac OS, in which case you already need to use a VM and have done for at least a decade.

I'm struggling to think of any games in OS X era where the Mac would be even close to the easiest or best place to play them.

I appreciate the notion that if you've bought the software you want to be able to keep using it for as long as possible, but we're talking about the niche-est of niches here.

Isn't this how node.js works now?

Except this is explicitly against the TOS of macOS/OSX. This may be ok if you virtualize it on Apple hardware.

Not that I care, and note the DMCA/property law has a specific exemption for defeating copy protection if you bought the thing. But it is more work than you make it out to be.

It's not against ToS to run VMs with Windows in them.

It's also fine to virtualize a copy of macOS on an original hardware, but it hardly does anything for gaming as there is still no GPU acceleration available for macOS guests.

I was referring to macOS/OSX, but for Windows, it's actually against the licenses to virtualize anything but the Pro or Enterprise version. Considering the provisions in the DMCA about circumvention of copy protection being allowable, I'm not sure how enforceable this is.

Turns out other comments confirm for macOS, but I was under the impression Apple hadn't commented on it, though a plain reading of the license indicated it was ok.

> it's actually against the licenses to virtualize anything but the Pro or Enterprise version

At some point it was OK to virtualise Home OEM versions as long as it was not running twice at the same time. The wording made it so you couldn’t virtualise Win on Win with the same license but virtualising in a host OS like Linux on the hardware the OEM license was tied to was allowed. I don’t know how that flied with non-OEM Home licenses or if even that changed at some point though.

> Except this is explicitly against the TOS of macOS/OSX. This may be ok if you virtualize it on Apple hardware.

It is ok to virtualize macOS on a Mac.

The clause forbidding running non-server versions of macOS in a VM went away when they discontinued the server version of macOS back in 10.7 (2011). It's now perfectly fine as long as it's running on Apple hardware.

Games in a VM are often unplayable. Even something as old as the original Age of Empires is pretty bad when run under VirtualBox or VmWare Fusion.

That's curious, I've run games from that era (e.g. Starcraft) on a VM (Windows guest on Linux host) just fine. I don't think I even had hardware video acceleration working.

This is also why all programs should be distributed with source code. If not, you are at the mercy of the platform not to break what you have bought.

Not workable. But the source should be placed in escrow that releases it once the program is no longer supported.

Are there any actual escrows that do that?

Having app that heavily relies on 32-bit Carbon Api open sourced is useless. You can't replace those Api call with newer because they simply don't exist or have no alternative. It's not going to help much

Having access to the source makes it much easier for the community to do what they already do - create an open source re-implementation of the engine.

For games, I think it's feasible to make at least the code that interfaces with the OS into a separate, re-linkable, open-source library.

Translations between the APIs (Carbon to Cocoa, OpenGL to DirectX) might be very hard, but at least upgrades would be possible.

Wine shows you don't need the source of the programs to do that API translation.

That ultimatum is idealistic at best.

Not only that, the recourse of inspecting and modifying the code isn’t realistic to most people. Many open source projects die just because literally nobody with the skills required to maintain them are interested.

Then you get to certain types of programs where open source provides no benefit: specifically, games.

Games are largely just artistic content. Making games open source essentially means that all the content is going to be taken without compensating the artists. Open source works for other programs because they depend on interoperability. But games are just content, like a movie or book. The source is the product. For other programs, support and continual development are the product.

id [0] seems to get by fine by open sourcing their game engines.

And doing so has lead to a number of ports that wouldn't exist otherwise.

The artists are still compensated fine. Because they separate the engine from the assets. If you want to play the original game, fine, but own it.

But now the community gets to port the game easier to a new platform. Which is one of the reasons that it's easy to port DOOM to every platform out there.

[0] https://github.com/id-Software

They open source the product long after it has any revenue potential.

IME that's mostly true for traditional single player games, while even mildly successful multiplayer games may have an incredibly long tail (at east a decade or so?) where they are "paying the bills" very comfortably even though they're long past their heyday.

This happens on PC too but it attracts so much more development we don’t notice.

Personally to avoid the problem on any platform, I took to making my own pipeline for rapidly iterating on games. Currently able to quickly cut and paste together a variety of experiments in my editor, play a bit to feed my urge for novelty, and happily save money not buying them.

I have one passion project which is a mix of isometric graphics, kotor group based single player, a “neverending” procedural world. Currently working on a system to have a chat bot feed NPCs dialog, as an experiment in “never ending” story building. I’m having more fun imagining and building it, I don’t even care if I finish it. Way more engaging than yet another “Skyrim clone with tits” or COD 19: Farting Dust

Like you said the major interest in a game is at launch, there’s not the same long lived community building the games used to have. Other than prettier graphics, there’s been little interesting going on, especially in the AAA space.

Even much of the indie scene is nostalgia dripping pixel graphics and same old design.

I am done spending on the business friendly view of what my hobby should look like. It’s generating too little new information of interest to me.

> This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform, compared to Windows which can run decades old games fine.

But this has happened before. Pretty much every pre-2007 Mac game stopped working in 2012 after they removed Rosetta, their PPC emulator.

And 64-bit Intel has been available since Leopard, released in 2007. So that leaves a tiny window of 32-bit only releases.

On the other hand, the removal of OpenGL, if/when that ever happens, might have worse consequences.

But at least dropping PowerPC support was predicated on a legit hardware architecture change. And that new architecture actually made porting from PC much easier.

This change, by contrast, feels entirely unnecessary. The amd64 architecture natively supports i386 code. I realize it makes Apple's maintenance burden lower, but, they can deal with that.

We’ve heard rumours for a few years that Apple is considering shipping MacBooks which use the Ax ARM chips that power their phones and iPad pros. Those CPUs have excellent performance per watt, and decent performance overall. If they’re planning on repeating the Rosetta play that they pulled off during the PowerPC -> Intel transition, it might make a lot of sense to deprecate i386 applications first so there is less surface area they need to emulate. The x86 instruction set is way too complicated as it is without having architecture modes to worry about.

Apple has the ability to both support i386 software on x86 machines, and choose to not emulate that software on future ARM machines. If your supposition is correct, Apple is effectively crippling their current products in order to make their future products seem less bad by comparison. That's horrible.

And in the process, Apple is asking developers to rewrite i386 code for an amd64 architecture which they ultimately intend to abandon anyway.

Maybe. Maybe? I doubt they're motivated by malice or laziness, but nobody in this thread can say one way or the other. What I can say with high confidence is that unless we're in the meeting room at Apple we can only speculate based on little to no hard information. It's entirely possible that there are sound engineering reasons behind what they've done.

AMD64 is going to be around for a very long time; any developer that is having difficulty migrating code from i386 has more fundamental problems than Catalina.

And it’s happened on the Windows side, too.

You can’t just run transport tycoon, rollercoaster tycoon, or xcom without any sort of modification on Windows 10. You’re either using an open source drop-in game engine or a packaged DOSBox setup from Steam. Or in the case of Rollercoaster Tycoon, a rewritten game (RTC Classic).

Windows 10 doesn’t run 16-bit applications, and Windows 10 doesn’t work nicely with a large amount of Windows XP era software.

Windows 10 still supports 16 bit applications if you run 32 bit windows.

The important difference is that Windows supported 16-bit for well over a decade after moving to 32-bit Windows. Well after how long the game developers intended for their games to stay relevant.

The fact that I can still run Age of Empires 2 on Windows 10, from 20 years ago, is amazing compared to the backwards compatibility track records of most software.

If only we all got more than ten years to port our stuff forward.

The first 64-bit Macs came out 16 years ago. The first 64-bit Intel Macs came out 13 years ago. The 32-bit to 64-bit transition on the Mac has not been an abrupt one.

I think we're looking at this the wrong way.

The reason Microsoft killed 16 bit support (In 64 bit editions of Windows) is that very few people were actually running 16 bit apps at that point. Where Microsoft made a decision based on what their users were actually doing, Apple has a made a decision based on what it wants their users to be doing.

The amount of time isn't really relevant. If lots of your users rely on 32 bit software, you should put in the effort to make them work. Apple products are expensive, and I think it's reasonable to expect this in return.

The true reason is that intel didn't support coexistence of Virtual 8086 mode with 64-bit mode. So adding 16 bit app support would require loads of work to get it working as part of a 64 bit OS.

Regular protected mode code has built in support that allows easily running 16 bit apps, so maintaining compatibility was a no-brainer. The moment the trade-off changed, Microsoft decided to drop support for 16 bit apps.

Personally, I don't mind that very much, because dosbox is a great product that bridges the gap perfectly.

Really, all they'd have to do is drop a v86 emulator into NTVDM. There actually exist a handful of projects attempting to bring emulated 16-bit support to 64-bit Windows, including one that's based on that leaked Windows source code (which apparently had a copy of the CPU emulator they used on other platforms back when there were actually non-Intel builds of Windows).

Give OpenRCT2 a try.

16 bit is an order of magnitude older than 32 bit though

16-bit applications?? Of course I don't expect Monkey Island 2 released 30 years ago to work on Windows 10, it would be nice but is easy to conclude it wouldn't work without even trying; what is being talked about here are game released few years ago and even just last year for mac.

The original Halo?

Yep. And Age of Empires II from Wine bottle (i.e. http://portingkit.com/en/http://portingkit.com/en/

I wonder if selling Mojave disk images with games pre-installed would be profitable.

At the same time, it will also WEED OUT a lot of crapware. Only the best and best-cared-for software will remain :D.

Probably true for apps. But most games are in full screen and do not use OS UI elements anyway. So I'm not sure how OS upgrade can weed out crap games

> This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform

Apple Arcade rescues that somewhat.

I'm not a fan of not owning games or not being able to play them offline whenever I want in the future, but Apple Arcade is actually kinda nice so far.

> I can just move to PC and keep the games I own.

A small nitpick, you don't _own_ the games in your Steam library.

You don't own _any_ video games, you have a license and might happen to have physical media.

A pedantically correct, but ultimately pointless observation.

One can install and play a game bought from gog.com any time one wants, unlike with games bought from Steam, which have DRM, have to be activated online and must ping the Steam servers periodically.

Technically correct is the best kind of correct.

Your example is valid, but there are plenty of other examples pushing in the opposite direction—for example PS4 and XB1 games delivered on physical media. Yes they'll play out of the box "forever" ... but in order to download important (occasionally critical) software patches you need the explicit blessing of Sony or Microsoft servers. And you could lose these for reasons that are wholly unrelated to your legitimate ownership of physical game media.

The PS, Xbox and Steam are all different incarnations of cloud services. They are very convenient, but ultimately don't offer any guarantees that one can play the games even a week from now.

At least consoles work without issue in offline mode, although MS wanted to disable that a few years ago, were confronted massive backlash and had to cancel their plans.

A big and relatively recent problem with consoles is that even offline games now more or less require a patch, because they're launched with major bugs.

Not a nitpick, but a well deserved criticism. When buying anything from Steam, the customer is at the mercy of a cloud service, since the offline mode deactivates itself after a certain time, or randomly.

Steam have banned customers and took away access to their paid games library for petty reasons and were sued into accepting refunds.

gog.com is an alternative where one doesn't depend on the goodwill of any company. If you have the setup files and they work once, they will continue to work, at least when the OS vendor pulls an Apple.

Really sad I cannot play Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded on Catalina. I bought this game. Same for my old scanner. Both 32bit only.

Seems I won't update to Catalina or I need to find a longterm solution with VMs.

Is your scanner supported by SANE on linux? Some people have put a surprising amount of work creating Linux drivers for scanners

That this is even remotely acceptable is a sign of how unidealistic the industry has become, compared to Java of 20 years ago which promised write once, run anywhere.

If you did however stick to pure Java 20 years ago, your app probably runs fine now. That is the way things should be. This compatibility breaking from Apple is just a slap in the face.

This is why Microsoft is the better long-term play: Backwards compatibility -- their commitment to the investment of labor. If you build your software on Apple, there almost certainly will come a point in the future where your code will cease to work.

Microsoft has made a commitment to backward compatibility. It's such a huge benefit. I have code that has continued to run, untouched, for decades. I don't have to upgrade my development environment. I don't have to buy a new laptop to run the latest xcode. I never have to worry that my years of investment into my own software platform will be worthless three years from now or require unknown amounts of recoding to work.

This is not true of Apple, Ruby, or almost any open source project.

I want to continue moving forward all the time. I loathe the requirement to go back and redo what I'd already done and works. It wastes my time, my money, and my confidence in my vendor.

I feel the same. I started a project just four years ago, and now I feel that I'll need to rewrite a huge portion of the graphics code to work with future Mac versions.

I also have a lesser fear that in order for my application to work on some future version of Windows, I'll need to deal with code signing and directory access rights nonsense in order for customers to think that the software "works properly". But that's just speculative. Apple's already doing it.

Why should I trust your application to run rampant on my computer? Since when was it a bad thing to isolate what an application can do? Even if you aren’t being purposefully malicious and being sloppy you can still cause damage. Look at what happen with the Google Chrome installer on Macs that had system integrity protection turned off.

https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/15235262?hl=en

It's nonsense because it didn't exist before. Imagine you're a long-time user of my software. You upgrade your operating system (because's Apple's marketing tells you to) and find that my software doesn't work anymore. Who made the change? Apple. Who do customers complain to? Me. Despite any argument, Apple's change has cost me $1000+ of development costs for users to continue using my software. Apple is not my customer, and I don't feel that I owe it a penny. If MacOS didn't exist, it'd only make my life easier. If this change only affected new users, I'd have no complaint.

So in that case Apple should never introduced tighter security?

Well, if you want yo stay in business selling your software, you have to keep it updated. Would you also be upset if you couldn’t still sell 68K software in 2019? You either update your software or people will buy something else.

BareBones managed to sell and keep updating BBEdit between Apple transitioning from 68K Macs, PPC Macs, OS X and intel Macs.

Did you really think that you would never have to update your software? How long have you been in business?

It's always true that software must have a maintenance budget due to changing user markets.

My point is that compared to Windows or Linux, Mac is very expensive to maintain software for. If your software has mostly cross-platform code, I would estimate based on my experience that the Mac-specific work is 10x that of the others.

Let's just say thank God that `com.apple.security.cs.disable-library-validation` exists, so the 150 plugin developers for VCV Rack don't have to go through the notarization nonsense that I do. That would truly kill the software, or would force users to disable GateKeeper altogether (with `sudo spctl --master-disable`) to use.

You really think that Microsoft or Adobe spends 10x as much to support the Mac? If the ROI on Macs is so horrible compared to Linux then why wouldn’t Adobe or MS be dropping Mac support and instead support Linux?

Yes, platform-specific expenses are 10x on Mac vs. Linux and Windows. I said nothing about ROI. You're confusing that with platform-specific expenses.

ROI of platform = number of platform users * price - "platform-specific expenses"

Hopefully you can see why even if "platform-specific expenses" is high, the ROI of the platform can be higher than another platform, because the number of platform users is much higher.

If it is so much more expensive to support the Mac than Linux, why won’t the major software vendors support Linux?

Are you going to drop support for the Mac?

Because the "number of platform users" is very low (say 0.2-2% for professional users). I explained that above.

>Are you going to drop support for the Mac?

Probably not, but I might begin charging 20% more for Mac versions of the software.

You're not doing work for Apple, you're doing work that helps your existing customers have more secure systems.

If my customers wanted this, I would gladly budget for it. But nobody has asked for this, even when I bring it up.

The reason (I imagine) is that people use my software in professional/home studios where you typically have a dedicated computer to run the software. People purchase a computer based on the recommended specs of my software, and some don't even bother connecting it to the Internet after getting everything installed. If they do, they don't download random software from the Internet because 2 or 3 packages is all they need. There just aren't really any attack vectors that things like app translocation, notarization, code-signing, runtime entitlements, app stapling, paying $100/yr to be an Apple Developer member, etc would solve.

You don’t have to pay anything to get your code signed....

"Beginning in macOS 10.15, notarization is required by default for all software." https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizin...

Notarization requires that the software is signed with a certificate obtained from your $100/yr Apple Developer membership.

You don’t have to have a paid developer account.

Do you have a source of this? I was unable to notarize my software with my free Apple Developer ID account, so I paid $100 this year. This question (https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/121113) seems to be answered "no". I would love to be mistaken so I can treat my family to a fancy meal tonight.

https://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?/topic/26149-macos...

This service requires that the finished application be sent to Apple to be notarized as part of an automatic (and free) process, and that the returned "ticket" be "stapled" to the Mac app before distribution.

https://www.quora.com/How-long-will-it-be-before-Apple-requi...

My Google fu is escaping me because every citation of “free” is in the context of “virus free”

My subscription is about to run out in a few months, so I'll let it expire and test this, as it would save a bit of money, and a continuous Apple Developer membership isn't necessary in order to sign apps infrequently.

If you don't have a membership, you're not signing with a Developer ID certificate, so you're already requiring users to bypass Gatekeeper (with right-click + Open or by fully disabling it) to use your software. Those processes also bypass the notarization requirement.

So these users are unaware of 32 bit apps breaking on update and also going to the trouble up updating a computer that isn’t connected to the internet?

> I'll need to deal with code signing and directory access rights nonsense

It might be nonsense (and a nuisance) for developers, but it's far from that for everyone else.

It's about time developers stop assuming they can do whatever they want on everyone else's machines.

If it's my computer, developers don't have the right to screw it. Period.

And I have New Yorker's Digital Archive which doesn't except in my VM with an old Windows XP.

Nobody is perfect and you can't rely on anyone to solve this problem for you.

And how much has it cost Microsoft? Apple was able to successfully take the base of MacOS and port it’s operating system to a much lower spec phone back in 2007 and came to dominate the smart phone market (in profit they only thing that matters), the tablet market where MS failed repeatedly, not to mention it was able to port the base OS to everything from Watches and TV set top boxes - all things that Microsoft tried and failed at.

MS being so concerned with backwards compatibility has slowed down its ability to move fast into new markets even compared to Google.

If you are “building your software” for desktop PCs (or Macs) , you’re building on top of market that is becoming less important every year. There is no energy or investments going into desktop computers besides games and even that market is small. The only companies making real money in computer software are Microsoft and Adobe and even they are pivoting more toward browser based software and mobile.

Do you think that Apple should still bundle a PPC emulator with modern Macs? A 68K emulator?

Not being willing to drop legacy code comes with its own costs in maintenance and increases the vulnerability surface. Just the fact that there are over a half dozen ways to represent a string in Windows has led to security vulnerabilities, not to mention all of the other legacy cruft.

Apparently people keep forgetting that laptops and 2-1 hybrids are desktops as well.

Microsoft is doing pretty well there, to the point that in many shopping mall shops in Europe, Android tablets have been slowly being replaced by hybrid laptops running Windows 10.

Microsoft Surface sells are estimated to be 20% of Mac sales.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/surface-by-the-numbers-how-mic...

Apple sells about 20 million Macs a year and even that pales in comparison to mobile sells.

The total sales of computers is estimated to be around 63 million last quarter according to Gartner. Compared to 310 million cell phones (https://www.androidcentral.com/phone-sales-continue-decline-...)

> "Microsoft Surface sells are estimated to be 20% of Mac sales."

I'd say hardware sales like that are impressive, coming from a software company.

Apple's original core competency was creating hardware, with the software existing to drive hardware sales. (That there is a "hack" in "hackintosh" suggests that this should still be true today. They don't want you to buy their OS and run it on your own hardware, but they're fine with you buying their hardware and running your own OS on it.) Microsoft's core 'competency' has always been software. (I am of course abusing the term 'competency' in this case...)

Apple’s Mac sales are minuscule though in the grand scheme of things and only a small part of their revenue.

Their other products, while locked down to forbid running third party operating systems, are still nevertheless hardware. With the exception of itunes and safari on Windows, virtually everything Apple does involves selling hardware to consumers.

iTunes on Windows was to sell iPods.

Bingo. So that leaves Safari, which apparently no longer supports Windows but once did in the past.

Apple has a number of services available on other platforms, such as Apple Music.

I remember one story about a computer store in old days that carried lots of systems and parts. The new management decided to optimize this and carry only the popular choices and thus increase the profits. But the profits dropped instead. Before that the place was frequented by tech lovers. When their non-tech friends asked what and where to buy, they referred them there. Once the place was not good for tech people, the schema broke.

Mac sales may be small, but they are important part of the system. Who will write all these apps and on what hardware?

Developers will buy Macs and write apps for iOS regardless because that’s where the money is. Just like game developers use to buy expensive, obtuse, proprietary setups to write games for mobile.

So what? I was speaking about all PC OEMs selling Windows 10 devices, not only Microsoft.

Apple hardware is hardly relevant outside US and a couple of first tier countries.

Mobile phones are good for exactly that, phone calls, Internet and a couple of service apps, hardly for producing content.

So what? I was speaking about all PC OEMs selling Windows 10 devices, not only Microsoft.

I also posted estimates where computer sells are a fifth of mobile sells.

Apple hardware is hardly relevant outside US and a couple of first tier countries.

And neither are PC sales. Most people’s only computer is a phone and most of the money coming from those people are on mobile.

Mobile phones are good for exactly that, phone calls, Internet and a couple of service apps, hardly for producing content.

And unless you’re Microsoft or Adobe, you’re not making money selling PC software to produce content. Companies making money on software are either doing it indirectly through services or by producing applications/services running on the web or mobile.

There is plenty of money to be done doing desktop software, in fact that is what I have done the past five years, before switching employer.

So can you name one software vendor outside of Microsoft and Adobe making any real money selling desktop software - besides games?

How fast do you think a startup founder would get laughed out of an investor’s office of he started his pitch with “I have this great idea for a Windows Application”?

On the development side, it would be crazy for any developer to tie their horse to .Net Framework when MS has publicly said that it is in maintenance mode.

There were still a few jobs for Windows CE developers as late as 2014 even though MS abandoned it after VS 2008 (2007?). It would have been foolish for me to take such a job.

What do you consider "real money"? There's a whole bunch of industry-specific software vendors like Autodesk and The Mathworks that have plenty of dependent companies still buying licenses for desktop software.

Autodesk had a net income of a whopping $40 million last quarter.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ADSK/autodesk/net-...

And MathWorks revenue is about a billion.

Compare that to even your middling SAAS company. I’m only saying that it is silly for someone to invest their future employability on a platform (desktop Windows) and a runtime (.Net Framework) that even MS is moving away from. Everything they announce is about Azure, .Net Core, and heck even Android these days. I’m not even saying that Windows as a server OS is the worse thing in the world - even though it’s a lot cheaper in both licensing costs and resources to use Linux even if you use .Net Core.

Plenty of companies selling medical and industrial control equipment with Windows 10 or Qt based UIs.

And a big bunch of Fortune 500 buying consulting for internal applications.

So if you want names just pick random companies from Fortune 500 list, whose main business is completely unrelated to selling software packages.

And again, .NET Framework and .NET Core, are as we say in Portugal, sand out of the same bag, .NET.

Finally, Azure runs on Hyper-V, not Linux.

No they aren’t and you know this. .Net framework is in maintenance mode and not being actively updated with new features. That’s like saying .Net Compact Framework and .Net Core are the same thing.

As far as Azure running on Hyper V and not Linux, that’s irrelevant since developers of Azure are running in Linux VMs more than Windows VMs.

You are the only one here fighting hard to make the distinction between .NET Framework and .NET Core, as if that would matter to Fortune 500's.

They don't care for one second, we keep getting greenfield projects with deployment requests on top of 4.7.2. And brownfield projects still using 4.5.

For them even having the possibility to migrate to 4.8 would be a dream come true, let alone something like .NET Core.

So no matter what Microsoft wants to push, they have to keep these guys happy.

I’m not the only one “fighting hard to make the distinction”. Technically the distinction isn’t minor. One runs only on Windows, is in maintenance mode according to Microsoft and won’t get any major updates going forward and one is cross platform, actively being improved upon, and is the future of Microsoft’s development platform according to Microsoft

And you’re in Europe, do you really have an on the ground pulse of what most Fortune 500 American companies are doing? I’m frequently looking at the job boards and most greenfield projects are (unfortunately it’s my favorite language) not focused on C#/.Net at all and those that are trying to get from under both Windows licensing and the increased resources requirements and are moving toward .Net Core.

There are still holdouts for VB6 and I still see jobs wanting people to maintain them. But would you say maintaining legacy VB6 code was a good career move?

Most Fortune 500 operate world wide.

As for VB 6, if they pay alright and offer nice remoting package, why not.

Actually I did a couple of VB.NET (.NET 4.5) support activities during last year.

See, most people around this side of the pound aren't career obsessed.

We get to work, enjoy our IT unions (in some countries), 30 day vacations and have a life outside job.

As long as it pays the bills, most people are happy with what they get.

Until the company decides to change directions, you suffer from salary compression and inversions because HR decides to pay new employees market rate and (the hypothetical) you only get cost of living raises.

The last thing I want is to be tied to a company because I am not competitive in the market and then start complaining about “ageism”

And I’m on the opposite side of the country from the west coast FAANG and startup culture. I’m the definition of a standard “enterprise developer”.

The surface line is still very much behind in sales compared to Apple.

There are plenty of other options to buy Windows 10 devices from, including Android vendors like Samsung and Huawei.

And all together they sell less than a fifth of the number of mobile devices being sold. There is a reason that MS is running away from Windows and that they put .Net Framework in permanent maintenance mode. They don’t even want to spend money supporting their own browser engine.

App store gold rush is gone.

As for the .NET remark, you seem to be really pissed off about something, always bitching about MS stuff.

.NET couldn't be better.

I’ve never said that .Net wasn’t great. I said it would be dumb to tie your career to .Net Framework that is Windows only and is maintenance mode instead of .Net Core. I’ve had enough conversations with you on HN that I know you know the difference.

And I’ve said that most of the energy is going toward mobile, the web and services. No one outside of game makers are making money selling mobile apps. But they are making money selling services that users interact with over the web and mobile - not the desktop.

.NET Framework and .NET Core are .NET.

Windows is doing pretty well across 80% of desktop, laptop and 2-1 hybrid devices.

As mentioned, I spent the last 5 years doing Forms/WPF/UWP, and there is plenty of work there. Just as there is for anyone wanting to bother with either Qt or macOS.

At least in Europe no one starves by focusing on being a desktop developer.

Again, I know you know this stuff - you were involved in the discussion when it was posted here.

As mentioned, I spent the last 5 years doing Forms/WPF/UWP, and there is plenty of work there.

There were also jobs for Windows CE developers in 2015 after MS abandoned it in 2007, would that have been a good career move?

Microsoft said that they are only focusing on compatibility with Windows for .Net framework going forward and they will be adding features to .Net Core that won’t be ported to .Net Framework.

https://www.itwriting.com/blog/11291-state-of-microsoft-net-...

This is now changing. Microsoft has shifted its position so that .NET Framework is in near-maintenance mode and that new features come only to .NET Core. Last month, Microsoft’s Damian Edwards stated that ASP.NET Core will only run on .NET Core starting from 3.0, the next major version.

From the C# program manager.

Async streams, indexers and ranges all rely on new framework types that will be part of .NET Standard 2.1. As Immo describes in his post Announcing .NET Standard 2.1, .NET Core 3.0 as well as Xamarin, Unity and Mono will all implement .NET Standard 2.1, but .NET Framework 4.8 will not. This means that the types required to use these features won’t be available when you target C# 8.0 to .NET Framework 4.8.

.NET Core is yet to be embraced by most enterprises, everyone is waiting for .NET 5 to actually make the switch. Too much software is now making the transition into .NET Framework 7.x, to bother with half baked support from Core to many APIs like EF6, WCF and components from third party vendors.

From where I am standing, we don't care what Microsoft calls it this month, it is .NET.

It’s not about what you care about the industry is definitely moving further away from Windows desktop apps as it’s main focus and is definitely moving toward services and mobile. How much clearer can you get than the CEO of MS saying they are distancing themselves from Windows as a priority? If enterprises are embracing Linux even on Azure, their definitely not using .Net Framework.

Today more Linux VMs are being hosted by Azure than Windows. Microsoft is making serious investments in cross platform development and making Linux a first class development environment on Windows with improvements in WSL.

EF6 and WCF is legacy. Really? Are we arguing about SOAP in 2019?

It’s not about what Microsoft is “calling it”. It’s about where all of the future emphasis of .Net improvements are.

The industries I move on, we don't care about coffee shop programming trends.

Lets talk again in five years time.

So REST instead of SOAP is a “coffee shop trend”? That migration has been going on for at least a decade.

We already know the “trend” that .Net is going in from no less than the program manager of .Net. That “trend” is no major new features for .Net Framework and it will be stuck at 4.8.x forever while all of the innovation is happening with .Net Core.

We also know the “trend” of MS’s focus from no less than the CEO of Microsoft - a de-emphasis on Windows and an emphasis on cloud and moving to where the customers are - Linux and services for both web and mobile users.

Don’t you think it’s quite telling that the biggest news for Windows 10 lately is improved support for Linux via WSL 2.0 and how much emphasis is being put on VS Code?

It is, just right now I am working for a customer where SOAP keeps being relevant as ever.

.NET Core will be relevant for this kind of customers in about 5 years time, again we are still targeting 4.7.2 for bleeding edge customers.

Microsoft wants to win the hearts of FOSS developers that buy Macs as pretty UNIX for developing GNU/Linux software and are unhappy with the latest "Pro" offerings without having ever written a single line of Objective-C or Swift, that's all.

It is, just right now I am working for a customer where SOAP keeps being relevant as ever.

This might surprise you, but the world doesn’t revolve around your niche.

NET Core will be relevant for this kind of customers in about 5 years time, again we are still targeting 4.7.2 for bleeding edge customers.

By definition, customers using .Net Framework and SOAP are not bleeding edge. They wouldn’t have been bleeding edge 5 years ago. The industry was already moving toward REST.

Are you really saying that all of Microsoft from the C# Program Manager up to the CEO is wrong for focusing more on mobile, services, and the web than Windows desktop because your niche is still focused on the desktop?

You do realize that most of the world’s only interaction with a “computer” is via the web and mobile don’t you?

>App store gold rush is gone.

Depends what "gold rush" means. The App Store makes more money than ever.

For the top 1% of app developers that try their luck, out for people living in first tier countries.

And if we remove the FAANG related products even less.

The world is a little bigger than that.

It’s not just the 1% of app developers making money developing apps. There are plenty of mobile developers making money working for companies that sell services that customers use on mobile devices. I was making a living over a decade ago doing “mobile development” working for a company deploying to ruggedized Win CE devices.

The only way to make money from people using “computers” in developing countries is by targeting services at people using mobile devices. They definitely aren’t using Windows PCs and the companies creating services aren’t hosting on Windows.

As far as “FAANG” related products, none of those companies are making most of their money from selling apps on the App Store. They are also making money from services/advertising that people access via the cell phone.

You don’t make money statistically as a mobile developer by trying to sell an app on the store. You make money from working for a company as a mobile developer just as you do from being a web developer.

Yep, and we are happily doing that by deploying PWAs and mobile ASP.NET applications on IIS.

And how does WPF and Win Forms help there? You’re (hopefully) not communicating with mobile apps and websites using SOAP.

I know IIS like the back of my hand - heck I was deploying Classic ASP apps to it almost 20 years ago. But, I see where the industry - and MS are going. I’m not going to stick my head in the sand like VB6 users 10 years after it was abandoned by MS.

Microsoft did manage to port Windows to mobile platforms, with success to some extent. Notice that it's Windows for Desktop that maintains support for legacy software. Support for legacy software isn't necessarily detrimental to success. Microsoft's lost battle in phone market has nothing to do with it. In addition, Microsoft seems to be doing just fine in the other markets, and it's been growing on cloud, which we may consider to be a new market. The whole 'support legacy and risk being stuck on the past' argument makes no sense.

What “success” was that? Sure it had some modicum of success with Win CE/Win32/and .Net compact framework but success was fleeting. The development environment was nice but they ended up completely killing backwards compatibility with the newer versions and abandoned all of the enterprise/ruggedized devices. The last version of Visual Studio that supported then was VS 2007 while there were plenty of $1000+ ruggedized devices and kiosks that still ran Windows CE - I developed for them back in the day.

Windows on mobile was a mess.

You couldn't just take any Windows app and run it. It had to be a specially designed UWP one of which there weren't many. And then there was different OSs depending on whether it was on ARM or not, running UWP exclusively or not. I am a developer and even I couldn't understand the rules.

It's unquestionable that Microsoft's decision not to encourage developers to rewrite their apps (or at least offer a Carbon solution) really hurt them in the mobile space.

You can't run any Mac apps on iOS.

I think Microsoft's big problem on mobile was if anything a first-mover disadvantage; they had Windows Mobile designed to compete with Blackberry and Java ME devices. The iPhone was able to basically produce a second-generation product that bested all of those things. Microsoft wasn't able to catch up the second generation by the time the market was entrenched, and I suspect that it was less an engineering challenge caused by backwards compatibility (backwards compatibility didn't hinder the NT kernel from powering the Xbox One) and more of a cultural challenge.

The Xbox One isn’t a great example of a successful product. The whole XBox division still hasn’t recouped its losses.

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/251038-theres-no-profit-m...

not making money on the xbox 1X. but making profit on the One S. which is an excellent piece of hardware for the sub 300 you pay for it.

The Xbox One has had problems from a business perspective, but I think they have more to do with the Kinect inflating the launch price than they do the NT kernel.

This is partially right -- before "modern" Windows Phone spun off of 8.1 and 10 there was a Windows 7-esque mobile OS, and one that tracked XP. They still ran on different processors, but with an API very similar to the desktop OS. But, comparing them to Android they did not have any major benefits or detriments.

What I think made them fail was their relative obscurity. For non-Intel platforms, Microsoft is very much in favor of boot locking and a lack of consumer control, perhaps at the behest of hardware creators who insist on NDAs. So these things were never really publicized.

Unless you have shares in Apple your whole point is invalid, you're looking to this from Apple point of view which is very good for her business but not mine, i care about the company that give me the best solutions to my problems not the company that's can milk me the last day of my life.

Not having to worry about yet another security vulnerability caused by 10 year old code does impact me. It’s also nice to have other Apple products that MS could never produce because they worshipped at the alter of backwards compatibility.

Running outdated code on a bloated operating system doesn’t benefit me.

What product on the PC does the Apple have that MS could never produce?

How is MS doing with phones? tablets? Watches ($15-$20 billion dollars in revenue and profitable), heck even set top boxes?

I was not aware that phones, tablets, and watches were on the PC...

But on that note: the Surface tablet is considered the best hybrid PC in its class, and that includes Apple devices. The XBox has sold several tens of millions of units in each generation.

Oh, and here's the kicker: Microsoft's hardware is universally superior to Apple hardware in the same class. You can still use Microsoft hardware from the turn-of-the-century. Even Zunes still work (though you need to connect them as MTP devices instead of using the Zune Store). I have an HP Windows Phone that still works, and still handles call better than an iPhone.

I don't know anyone who still has an Apple laptop, PC, or other hardware more than 10 years old. Apple products simply aren't built to last more than a handful of years before they fall apart because you're using them wrong.

>Not having to worry about yet another security vulnerability caused by 10 year old code does impact me.

Surely you're not suggesting that OS X is somehow more secure because it doesn't provide as much backwards compatability?

>It’s also nice to have other Apple products that MS could never produce because they worshipped at the alter of backwards compatibility.

It is looking more and more like Apple cannot produce products other people can, not the other way around. Most of their recent product announcements(2017 and after, especially) have begun to look quite disappointing in my eyes.

By definition, the less code you have to maintain the less surface area for vulnerabilities.

If that were true, you would see Apple’s products trending downward when other competitors are trending upwards.....

>By definition, the less code you have to maintain the less surface area for vulnerabilities.

It does not sound like you have any legitimate information about how Windows compatability increases vulnerabilites beyond vague statements. Trust me when I say that no one here thinks Windows is terribly secure, just that Mac OS X isn't secure at all either, and doesn't provide backwards compatability on top.

>If that were true, you would see Apple’s products trending downward when other competitors are trending upwards.....

Is this not the case? Lowered product buys have been offset by higher prices, but the craze of Apple products of the early to mid 2010s is over; I have also only heard negative things about their recent products too. The failed keyboard on Macbooks, how buggy the recent OS release has been, both of my roommates who have iPhone Xs are thinking about switching to Android after being plagued with constant hardware and software issues. Of course, it is possible I live in a bubble, but most people I know who have Apple technology complain a lot more about their tech than I do.

Samsung and every other vendor outside of China have announced lower sales as people keep their phones longer.

While everyone admits that Mac keyboards are horrible, Mac sales are so small compared to everything else Apple sells, it doesn’t really hurt their bottom line

both of my roommates who have iPhone Xs are thinking about switching to Android after being plagued with constant hardware and software issues.

Anecdote is not data.

It does not sound like you have any legitimate information about how Windows compatability increases vulnerabilites beyond vague statements.

Let me tell you a little story about how the half dozen different ways to represent and encode a string in Windows led to a security issue in IIS where you could just encode a DOS command in a browser window and have it execute remotely....

https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/threats/paper/...

Or a DCOM vulnerability in 2019. No one uses DCOM anymore.

https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2003-0352/

Oh, crap! DCOM! I'm have trauma just seeing those letters in that order.

As it says right on the URL, that CVE is from 2003, not 2019, and it doesn't affect any Windows version past XP.

Yes and by then you already had the 7 plus versions of defining a string dating back to Windows 3 (1992). Backwards compatibility was already a problem then. Since then, MS has had 15 more years worth of cruft on top of that s d yet more ways to define a string. If backwards compatibility caused a security vulnerability back then, how much old Windows 95 code do you think is causing issues now?

>Not having to worry about yet another security vulnerability caused by 10 year old code does impact me.

10 year old code is insecure as opposed to the just-written code that replaces it?

They didn’t “replace it” they got rid of it. There was no replacement for Carbon for instance.

Apple being able to move quickly definitely benefits consumers. The OP's specific example was Apple's ability to execute on the iPhone using current tech but without the restraints of supporting legacy development.

MS's backwards compatibility is definitely great. It's probably also a big opportunity cost and a hindrance to them developing new things. Tradeoffs everywhere.

”Tradeoffs everywhere”

Exactly. Even though breaking backwards-compatibility is annoying for users, Apple doesn’t do this out of sheer spite.

You've actually made grandparent's point.

What the grandparent said doesn't exclude Apple as a company giving "the best solutions to [a user's] problems". If anything, it can be an enabler.

You say "i care about the company that give me the best solutions to my problems".

Well, hundreds of millions had the same concern on mobile, and they settled on Apple (and others on Android), not Microsoft.

And that was because Apple could (partly thanks to its lax approach on backwards compatibility), be able to shrink down OS X as needed for mobile (and now wearables), make the transition to x86 and later ARM for mobile (and in the future ARM for desktop perhaps), and so on.

In general, they can move forward faster, break things if needed, etc.

Then there are other concerns. I don't want my OS to be burdened with ancient code (and vulnerabilities etc). I don't want developers to stick to ancient versions and not integrate new features etc (Apples forces their hand to -- those that can't be bothered are eliminated). And I don't want a mix of new, old, medium-old UIs on my Mac, like I get on Windows (depending on which decade of native UI framework, widgets, etc they use).

How much has it cost MSFT? They have a trillion dollar market cap, so I would say that’s not a particularly relevant question.

Well Uber also has a nice market cap. Only on HN is market cap more important than silly things like profit.

But MS recent success has nothing to do with maintaining backwards compatibility. They had to purposefully move away from emphasizing Windows to be successful and move to the cloud, Office on other platforms, abandoning IE, give up the idea of ever selling Windows to end users when it isn’t bundled with the computer, building IE on top of Chrome, and by announcing an Android device.

Does that seem like Windows was a winning strategy?

Blackberry had a nice market cap too, a year or so before they went under...

And how much has it cost Microsoft?

Are we really worried about how much money it will cost to the company with the largest free-cash pile in the world? They have literally tens of billions of dollars of cash literally just sitting around doing nothing.

They can afford to throw 0.0001% of that at maintaining backward compatibility.

As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, it’s not just about money. It’s also about path dependence – if you are dedicated to backward compatibility there are lots of changes you can’t easily do to your products. It can hinder innovation.

It's worth considering the different markets here. Raymond Chen [0] posted this in 2006 - "On the importance of backwards compatibility for large corporations" [1]

> Representatives from the IT department of a major worldwide corporation came to Redmond and took time out of their busy schedule to give a talk on how their operations are set up. I was phenomenally impressed. These people know their stuff. Definitely a world-class operation. One of the tidbits of information they shared with us is some numbers about the programs they have to support. Their operations division is responsible for 9,000 different install scripts for their employees around the world.

> That was not a typo.

> Nine thousand.

> This highlighted for me the fact that backwards compatibility is crucial for adoption in the corporate world. Do the math. Suppose they could install, test and debug ten programs each business day, in my opinion, a very optimistic estimate. Even at that rate, it would take them three years to get through all their scripts. This isn’t a company that bought some software ten years ago and don’t have the source code. They have the source code for all of their scripts. They have people who understand how the scripts work. They are not just on the ball; they are all over the ball. And even then, it would take them three years to go through and check (and possibly fix) each one.

> Oh, did I mention that four hundred of those programs are 16-bit?

16-bit. Ten years after Windows 95 came out.

[0] A great source of backwards compatibility stories.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061106-01/?p=29...

Well seeing how Microsoft’s profits have increased compare to Apple’s, which was the better idea? Selling to consumers or businesses?

And MS’s recent successes have had nothing to do with Windows. MS’s growth has come from o365 being available everywhere and Azure - where most of the VMs are in fact Linux not Windows. Not to mention that .Net for Windows and all of the related technology (WinForms, WPF, etc) are in maintenance mode while MS concentrates on cross platform .Net Core.

Microsoft is doing the same thing with Windows that SJ said he would do with the Mac “milk it for all it’s worth and move on to the next big thing”. MS is running away from Windows as it’s cash cow quickly.

I’ve always thought Windows was compromised for consumers because of the need to support this sort of enterprise. In some ways it opened up the opportunity for Apple to makes its comeback.

Windows runs on refrigerators and signage panels and ATMs just fine. It's not based on since inherent technical inadequacy, people just don't like MS products. Usually because they're late and don't quite align with what normal people want... But I don't think this has anything to do with backwards compatibility. From the Zune to WP10, what kills Microsoft in an area is "Also-ran", "not good enough", and "kinda clunky"

How else do you define as “running just fine” than - something people actually want? Most of the kiosk/vertical market type devices are running a version of Android now. The vendors that use to sell ruggedized Windows mobile devices like Intermec have since started reflashing them to run Android.

I have a 32-bit application I use regularly to interface with old hardware (which isn't on the list incidentally; I suspect there are many other niche applications like this).

The hardware vendor isn't going to re-write it. As such I have to...

1) Avoid MacOS upgrades forever, or 2) Let the hardware become nearly impossible to use (there are workarounds on the device itself, but it's really painful to use), or 3) Write a new application myself.

If my 6-year old MacBook can last until I find something competitive with Logic Pro on Linux, I won't be buying another Apple machine. There's nothing else I need it for.

That hardware has software that works on modern Linux kernels?

No, but if it doesn't have software that works on my Mac either, that's one less reason to stay on the Mac. At this point I'm down to one remaining reason to stay on the Mac (Logic Pro) and I'd like to find a feasible alternative.

> I have a 32-bit application I use regularly to interface with old hardware

And the relevance of this use case is something that "using a laptop in a coffee shop" Apple users seem to be completely and utterly oblivious to.

Yet that hardware often has a useful life far longer than the computer plugged into it, or the software that runs on that computer. On top of that, there may not even be a suitable/comparable "modern and supported" replacement for that hardware.

Have you taken a look at Bitwig Studio? Runs natively on Linux.

Not yet, I'll give it a look.

Is it possible to virtualization an older release of OS X and run your app? It might be hard to find an image but it can be done. I have a 2011 MBP that bit the dust and I’ve seen been able to virtualize OS X (not sure about MacOS) and load a back up from Time Machine.

It is possible.

Certainly. Proof, ca. 2017: https://jasomill.at/X×X.jpg

Side note: the Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard VMs in this screen shot were running OS X Server to comply with Apple's pre-Lion license restriction prohibiting virtualization of non-Server versions of the OS. I have no idea which hypervisors, if any, enforce this restriction (nor if old versions of OS X Server are still available for purchase directly from Apple and/or available for non-production use through the Apple Developer Program as they once were).

> I have code that has continued to run, untouched, for decades.

This isn’t always a good thing. I usually don’t like when a piece of software feels like it hasn’t been updated since the 90s. But I guess we don’t want some military defense system to break because it’s 32-bit either.

I could hardly care less how modern a piece of software "feels" as long as it's usable. It doesn't stop being usable 5 years later due to being out of fashion. Many recent redesigns (hello Gmail) are quite the opposite to me btw.

I care about fixing security holes, and actually useful improvements (to the UI as well, why not, when they make sense)

Well, when the software doesn’t support all of the new features of the platform, I definitely care. I hate that even today four years after it was introduced, there are still video apps on iOS that don’t support PIP on the iPad and apps that don’t support split view.

That is literally my metric for how good a piece of software is. If it can run for a long period of time with minimal to no maintenance that's the hallmark of good engineering. I couldn't care less about how dated it might look as long as gets the job done.

Absolutely. Microsoft will even preserve behavior that most people would consider bugs, just to keep old software running. I would say backwards compatibility is a guiding principle of consumer software development at MSFT.

Edit: It really says something that the top examples in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_compatibility are from MSFT platforms.

> This is not true of ... almost any open source project.

I don't think that's generally the case, in part because of the very nature of open source. And certainly, for example, I can easily compile over 30-year-old TeX and run 30-year-old Emacs code.

There's plenty of areas where Microsoft has dropped the ball on backwards compatibility. They've got operating systems they no longer support, including Windows 10 Mobile in just a couple months. There's hardware platforms they no longer support. Their "PlaysForSure" content can no longer be played. Their web browsers drop support for old technologies all the time, e.g., Edge doesn't support ActiveX. Xbox One is only backwards compatible with some Xbox 360 games, and Xbox 360 was only backwards compatible with some Xbox games.

Really, the only area where Microsoft has bent over backwards for backwards compatibility is Windows-on-x86, because that's been their golden goose for 30 years.

A couple weeks ago, their CEO said "The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us". Will they continue to work their butts off in the name of backwards compatibility, or will they start treating it the same way they do their services, media stores, game consoles, and web browsers? I'm not optimistic Microsoft is going to be a better long-term play in this department.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/3/20896908/microsoft-window...

> Edge doesn't support ActiveX.

They maintain Internet Explorer 11 which has support for ActiveX...

....for people who choose to sell software it might be. For users this might not matter much at all. I’d rather they remove the bad parts than keep old software working.

Is this really true? I feel like I keep hearing about how $companyX is still on Windows 95/98/XP/7 and old software is often cited as a reason for not upgrading.

Pretty much why the z and i Series have faithful followings, the investment made in some cases decades ago still has value.

Microsoft's problem is potential customers refuse to do business with them because of Bill Gates failure to act in good faith during the desktop era. See also how everything Intel acquires shrivels and dies.

Same will happen to Google and Facebook.

> This is why Microsoft is the better long-term play: Backwards compatibility

Small friendly jab: My trusty Photoshop CS2 doesn't agree.

> This is why Microsoft is the better long-term play...

There’s never going to be one single factor that makes one platform ‘the best’ for everybody. Windows platform improvements has been a dumpster fire for over a decade. Windows 10 seems to have staunched the bleeding by being a proper desktop OS again, and Windows subsystem for Linux looks cool. But their dev story is a hot mess, with a trail of the carcasses of half assed and abandoned dev frameworks behind them.

Different users and developers just have different needs and priorities.

This has not been my experience. Moving from dos/Windows 3 to 95 broke a lot of software, particularly games. The upgrades to Vista and 7 broke so many programs that they included an XP VM to get old stuff to run.

QuickTime 7 is the biggest loss. Really wish that would somehow be updated/supported as a 64-bit app, as QuickTime X does not replace it.

I believe the whole QuickTime architecture is now gone. The new QuickTime Player X is implemented using AVFoundation (which started on iOS and got ported to the Mac) instead

We made an app to try to fill that gap! Check it out if you like: https://videovillage.co/screen/

Is there a trial? I'd like to test it but $99 to even download the app is a hard ask.

The very last one on the list, TextWrangler, is simply a 32-bit app. No big deal. They have offered BBEdit (the big brother to it) as a replacement.

https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/faqs.html#continue

I can understand eliminating CarbonLib support, though I would have made CarbonLib an optional component you needed to install on the OS a couple years ago to make it clear this was now an optional component that may no longer be supported in the near future.

I also don't get why they would eliminate all 32-bit userspace support though - like why eliminate support for 32-bit Cocoa apps, and I think Apple made a mistake here by eliminating support.

At what point should they drop support?

For carbonlib? No idea, now seems fine. For 32-bit cocoa apps? I see no obvious technical reason to drop support, unless I'm missing something.

I think their rationale is that they don't want to maintain 32-bit and 64-bit code forever.

But IMO, Apple should have removed Carbon last year (six years after deprecation). That would have made the removal of 32-bit Cocoa a bit less traumatic.

Even though Linux distributions have been slowly dropping support for running on 32-bit systems nobody is talking about dropping 32-bit multilib support. The cost is primarily disk space, and Apple could just make 32-bit libraries an optional download.

Making CarbonLib an optional component several years ago would have made it clearer to users that "this is going away"

“Users” don’t know what CarbonLib is. When Apple announced that they weren’t porting CarbonLib, developers knew.

Users would have noticed when Application X stopped working unless they downloaded this thing that the download page for makes very clear will be unsupported in 2 years.

Do you really think any app developer would ask the users to download a dll from the web to make their app work? They would jusr bundle it like installers bundle the Java runtime or Windows apps bundle the compatible version of msvcrt32.dll

Just to hazard a guess...

"Intel officials believe that ARM Macs could come as soon as 2020": https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/02/21/intel-officials-b...

My guess: The binary translation support they’re going to build into ARM Macs will exclusively support x64, including low-cost bridging between x64 application code and ARM64 library code.

Not to mention Apple never leaves deprecated runtimes around for more than a few years. Once 64-bit Carbon was canned the writing was on the wall.

Thats a fair idea, I believe x86-64 is less complex with fewer addressing modes than x86 is. So that makes sense.

I'm still not sure about how I feel about an ARM laptop, I'm not opposed though.

Arm architecture is rock-solid. The trick is making an ARM processor fast enough for desktop or laptop use. ARM has unfortunately been relegated to low-end devices even though the architecture could do well for high-end machines. We don't have a good interop for running x_86 or x_64 code on ARM so the compatibility isn't there for most users (like Windows 8 ARM). Linux is mostly fine on ARM if you can compile from source and you have a compiler for that given language that works for ARM.

My guess: the old fragile Objective-C runtime ABI.

They could have done a new ABI, but that'd have broken compatibility anyway...

Why is it more fragile than the same objc runtime in 64 bit?

Because the 32-bit runtime has a fragile base class problem that can’t be fixed—without breaking binary compatibility. Class instance variable layout and instance sizes in the i386 runtime are fixed; making this flexible was the major improvement introduced with the x86_64 runtime.

Perhaps these apps were already well beyond supported? I don't use anything except 1Password on the list at the link and the current supported version is 7. Version 2.x would have been sometime and many security updates ago, non?

On Windows it is perfectly reasonable to expect aps running even if they are 20 or sometimes 30 years old.

64 bit Windows doesn’t run 16 bit Windows code.

https://youtu.be/8WP7AkJo3OE

Yes and no. You can run progman and file manager on modern windows. Hell, you can run DOS aps.

That's the 32 bit version. Without 64 bit support I wouldn't call it 'modern windows'. There's a reason almost nobody uses it.

Perhaps these apps were already well beyond supported?

Some of them are more than beyond supported. They're completely useless and unnecessary.

There are programs on there for connecting to PCMCIA modems and Palm Pilots.

That said, there is one item on that list that affects me, but I know that I've been avoiding a $299 upgrade for years, so it's not completely unexpected.

Just because the developer doesn't support something anymore doesn't mean I stop wanting to use it.

Theres also some games from relatively big names (Riot, Valve) that don't work. On one hand they had plenty of time to update. But OTOH with this and the OpenGL deprecation, maybe they saw the writing on the wall from Apple

If this were 20 years ago, people would be griping about some MS issue about providing less than adequate service, etc.

Apple has always been anal about their app store & apps. As a developer - it's a pain. As an end-user I appreciate it.

As an end user, I don't really appreciate that some of the apps I am using are just going to stop working.

Then don’t upgrade.

What happens when your laptop goes bust and you need to get a new one?

You're being bit by the reality that you paid for a software license, so you don't actually own anything.

If you had the source, recompiling it would not be trivial, but it'd be doable.

The FSF has a point here.

I'm quite surprised Apple isn't providing a VM wrapper to run these apps in a more or less seamless way, for at least the next 2-3 versions. This is leaving a lot of software, and a lot of people, without alternatives.

It’s been 10 years since Apple released a 64 bit OS and the last 32 bit x86 based Mac.

Yeah that looks like a lot of time, except we're looking at some hard evidence saying it wasn't, after all.

Apple helped push forward the state of the art on many things by dropping legacies (No floppy. No CD. No more serial, parallel, scsi, PS/2 ports), but on some it just hurt its own customers with excessive eagerness (USB-C and dongle hell. Headphone jacks, where the ideal timing would have been NEVER. And this very thread about 32bit support).

MacOS is not iOS. There aren't just signed apps coming from a store. They failed to account for that. And this is coming from the company which managed to make the 68K->PPC transition, and the PPC->x86 ones, mostly painless for its users. This is so disappointing, knowing what they're capable of.

What do you mean they failed to account for that? They have a mechanism for signed apps outside of the store that doesn’t cost the developers anything and even that can be bypassed by a simple control click.

But for reference.

PPC Macs were introduced in 1994 and 68K emulation was dropped in 2006 with the introduction of x86 based Macs.

OS X was introduced in 2001 and OS 9 support was dropped in 2006.

PPC support was dropped in 2006 (?)

Most of the apps on the list have newer supported versions.

> PPC support was dropped in 2006 (?)

And Rosetta, the PPC emulator, was dropped in 2011, with Lion.

Only five years after the last PowerPC machine was discontinued.

Less than half the time it took to discontinue 32-bit.

Correction I meant MacOS 9 support was dropped.

By "Failed to account for that" I mean that they failed to consider how much software has been produced outside their control, so they should have been more considerate with the timeline for dropping compatibility. And there's plenty, plenty more stuff outside these 235 apps - sometimes new versions are expensive and do nothing new or useful for most users.

Here we are talking about dropping application that the CPU is still fully capable of running. There's no silicon advantage like on the latest iPhones. There's no big performance penalty running an emulated app, which would quickly drive people to use something native. There's no Moore's law obsoleting your current platform nearly as quickly as it once happened.

Apple has, in the past, treated people better when changing architecture that it just did with this thing, where the architecture stayed the same.

Edit: To the long list of past architectures Apple has dropped, maybe the root of the problem would be that I (mistakenly, maybe) do not consider 32-bit as past. I consider it still somewhat current, so seeing it dropped like this is less acceptable.

How is 32 bit “current”? Intel introduced its first 64 bit chip in 2004. By 2009, the Core 2 Duo was mainstream.

Apple hasn’t sold a 32 bit computer in a decade.

Apple sold 32-bit x86 Macs for less than a year, and they sold approximately zero of them during that year. It was a legacy platform that no one should have been targeting for nearly the entire history of macOS on x86.

Deep link to more readable form of the full list: https://gist.github.com/stevemoser/a4388df17633beae5bc3fb07d...

Our IT has told us to not upgrade macOS because the wireless keyboard/mouse combo most of us use stops working.

There’s gonna be a whole lot of unhappy Quickbooks users out there. There’s something special about accounting software that makes people reluctant to upgrade, and Intuit certainly hasn’t helped by making the process difficult, confusing and expensive.

quick books becomes crippleware every 3 years. your perpetual license, isn’t.

this is just a current list. QB will have an update. paid update.

I love TextWrangler. I may not upgrade just because of this. It still seems to handle massive files better than anything else I’ve used. Even BBEdit which is supposed to be it’s successor.

How can this be?

TextWrangler was always just a fork of BBEdit (it replaced “BBEdit Lite” as the free version) so there should be no real difference in performance.

BBEdit 12 also improved large file support so maybe give it another try if you haven’t recently?

Thanks, will do. I really didn’t understand it either but it was definitely the case!

I like good old Picasa for handling my photos. It works on High Sierra and, clicking OK a few times when it starts up, on Mojave. I know there are lots of other photo handlers, but Picasa is my choice. So, no Catalina for me.

Also, I use Office 2011 under High Sierra, so another reason.

Some pretty ancient versions of Office run on Windows 10, and I don't think it's because they're both MS; I think it's because MS makes fewer breaking changes between OS versions and maintains a lot of backwards compatibility for all apps.

This is not new, same data is on disk for 10.14 and 10.13. Completely wrong conclusions

Odd that it is so hard to get to the actual list that you can read and search.

Isn't there a way to use Ghidra and cross compile it to 64 bit?

Dang that's a lot of apps that are losing support.

And most important: TF2

The scheme behind the lack of downwards compatibility was always a pain with OSX. It's great for the app developers because they can offer you a paid upgrade to a new compatible version. But UX wise it's so bad it makes you consider moving to another OS.

I once had ProTools on a MacPro and found it out the hard way. I thought I could just upgrade to the next OSX version like with almost any other OS. But after the upgrade many apps including ProTools didn't work anymore and could only get up an running again after paying thousands of euro's to upgrade not only ProTools, also all it's plugins and a lot of other unrelated apps as well. That was my last MacPro, and I never bought and never will buy any OSX app again.

Killing 32 bit support is going to cost me about $600 per year, because I still have a pre-CC copy of Photoshop, In Design, and so on. I am absolutely furious at Apple for this.

so, uh, just don't upgrade?

Right? If you want to use legacy software, use legacy software. You can even dual boot!

You can even run the older version in a VM, with restrictions. https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOS1012.pdf:

”you are granted a limited, non- transferable, non-exclusive license:

[…]

iii) to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software, for purposes of: (a) software development; (b) testing during software development; (c) using macOS Server; or (d) personal, non-commercial use.”

What is the value that photoshop is adding to your business? Is it conducive to you earning enough to maintain a subscription? If not, why do you use photoshop? If yes, why shouldn’t adobe maximize their profits with a subscription based business model? It’s the market baby. Not defending adobe here, just giving a different perspective. Moreover, why should Apple stick with legacy tech to appease users like you?

> If yes, why shouldn’t adobe maximize their profits with a subscription based business model? It’s the market baby.

It's inefficient. You should get a good if its marginal cost is below its value to you. If Photoshop is worth 550 to you, the marginal cost of a copy is neglible and Adobe charges 600 €, you don't buy it and the market just threw away 550 €.

That is partially justified in that the business somehow has to finance the actual development and other fixed costs, and we don't have a much better mechanism for that yet. But preventing someone from using software because they can't afford someone's profits is just pure waste.

What about all the artists who aren’t a business? What about all the hobbyists? And finally... what about all the people that aren’t rich enough to spend $$$ a YEAR on photoshop?

Do they not deserve to keep using software they have already paid for, at great expense to them? Are they not worth “appeasing” because they’re not ~fortunate~ lucky enough in life, as you were?

Adobe has taken away this option. All power to them, but if you paid for a license, you have a right to keep using that software. Apple is the one here breaking software people have paid for.

>Apple is the one here breaking software people have paid for.

No, Apple is releasing brand-new software (MacOS Catalina) for free. If you can't, or don't want to run it, then don't.

It honestly sounds like you think you are entitled to it for some reason.

We are arguing that support for older versions of software is important, be it operating systems or client software. Support here means "keeping things running as they are", translating primarily to security patches with no frills attached.

Everyone is happy that Debian Unstable offers brand-new software in a rolling release, but their up-to-date LTS offering is also highly sought after.

I understand, thanks. I pointed out in another comment that Mojave support ends in 2021 which will have been 10 years since Adobe CS6's release. The grandparent seems to be arguing that they are entitled to support beyond that.

I get that Windows (for example) backward compatibility is even longer. That's great but involves trade-offs I don't think operating systems should be expected to make.

yes, it's been clear that that's where adobe was heading (adobe is where most of your ire should be directed, imho).

pixelmator and affinity designer jumped into the market at the right time (a few years ago) to capture adobe refugees like me for my (mostly modest) visual design needs.

in any case, you can stay on mojave to run creative suite for now, and perhaps via a VM in the future. catalina doesn't seem to have any killer features (other than maybe sidecar) that make it a must-have upgrade (and apparently enough bugs to make it a should-wait upgrade).

Can recommend Pixelmator Pro.

I could not justify a CC subscription for how infrequent I need to edit images (every other month).

Bigger fan of Affinity Photo; a lot more powerful to me.

Try out Affinity Photo. If $600 a year is too high an expense for what you produce with Photoshop, then it's likely Affinity Photo will more than exceed what you need. It's a flat $50.

or you could just stay on 10.14

This comment is a perfect illustration of the bizarre irrationality people have when discussing Apple.

You’re stuck on a 6+ year old piece of software because Adobe moved to a higher priced cloud-based model...maybe you should be mad at Adobe...6 years ago...not Apple?

Why though? He literally chose to stick with the old software, protesting with his money. Seriously though, what's the problem with expecting 32bit software to keep working?

The same problem with expecting 8-bit software to keep working.

All organizations have limited resources. Each hour spent supporting 32 bit is an hour that could’ve been spent on more important things.

8 bit software still works.

8 bit software still works on OS X Catalina?

Last I checked just as this guy is nursing his old ass pre CC adobe software along nothing is stopping them from continuing with an older OS X.

So which platform supports 8 bit software?

Emulators support nearly everything. I can even run a TI994a program on a PC, Mac, or Linux. If you can't run emulators on Mac that is sad news to me. Maybe bad example, it was technically 16 bit, but it was well over 30 years old. Here is a pet emulator: https://www.masswerk.at/pet/

Just the other day my brother told me he met a really talented graphics designer that still primarily uses some 25 year old sign design software. Never heard of it before, and don't remember the name.

We balk at having to pay monthly for software we bought over 10 years ago and even today we'd not miss any new features offered. Great artists (I'm not one of them) can produce great visuals. Limitation can be better for creativity than no restrictions for some anyway.

Of course you can run emulators. But that has nothing to do with OS vendors maintaining backwards compatibility.

Are you really arguing that Windows is compatibility with the Super Nintendo because you can run an emulator?

Yes, and this is how powerpc applications were supported for years.

Or, he chose to go with the software he had bought instead of moving to Adobe's new model of software as a service, where you pay a subscription fee plus an up front cost to use their software. It isn't so easy as "choosing not to upgrade to 64 bit" when the production company makes untenable demands. At this point, it's almost better struggling through with GIMP and Inkscape (almost) than dealing with the corporate hellscape that Adobe has become.

That's kind of the point, isn't it? Instead of directing one's ire at Apple or any other OS vendor for dropping 32-bit support, why not get upset at Adobe for creating a SaaS hellscape in the first place?

In the Adobe case, fine. What if people have 32 bit software where the vendor has gone out of business?

Perhaps it's time for them to invest in alternative software, or change to a legacy OS, or just simply not update to Catalina.

Or stop buying Apple products, which is my end-goal after all of this. Their stuff costs too much money to have them undermining my workflow at their whim.

Apple used to about things that "just work", now they're about things that "don't work anymore".

Microsoft doesn't seem to have trouble with 32-bit. Apple's market cap is roughly the same.

Market cap doesn’t say anything about fundamentals. That’s what profits are for. If you haven’t noticed, Microsoft is de-emphasizing Windows as a profit center.

Both companies have plenty of profits and the resources needed to maintain 32-bit compatibility indefinitely.

So I guess Apple should also have maintained support for 68K Macs indefinitely? Microsoft should have maintained support for 16 bit apps on 64 bit Windows? Should MS have also maintained support for running real mode 286 apps forever?

This is a bit different. Catalina is a casual upgrade. There is no warning during the install process. They'll see that something worked yesterday, same OS, same computer, and now it doesn't.

Yes there is.

https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/macos-c...

If the app isn't "recently" used, it doesn't warn you. I ran into this myself.

You said “They'll see that something worked yesterday, same OS, same computer, and now it doesn't.“

So “yesterday” doesn’t count as “recently”?

It was a poor choice of works. I didn't run Word 2011 yesterday - more like several months ago - but it would've worked yesterday before the upgrade.

The point remains: this will still bite people.

I can still use 32bit software under Windows, Linux and BSD. Seems everyone else has managed to keep this running, even when they have _much_ fewer resources than Apple.

You should expect it to work, naturally. But if you make an environment change (eg upgrade) well, the softwares expectations have changed so your expectations should change too.

Why is he upgrading his OS? Just dual boot or keep it as is.

In that situation I'd be mad at both. But primarily Apple.

Apple broke my working software. Emphasis on the working part. Upgrading even with one time payment software would still mean hundreds of dollars forked out because Apple broke it. If it wasn't broken I wouldn't upgrade.

Am I the only one who sees the absurdity of this?

If you’re cool using 6+ year old, blurry non-retina software...why do you need to upgrade to Catalina? Just stay on Mojave and you’ll be fine.

Did you really plan on using that 2012 edition of Photoshop until 2035?

There's nothing absurd about it. CS6 has retina support, and I use it too.

It has all the features I need - nothing added in the last 6 years has been worth switching to the subscription model.

What in Catalina is worth upgrading to? I don’t see much.

The 15+ security issues come to mind...

Apple supports the previous version of OSX with security updates for some time.

If the Catalina fixes have already been back-ported to Mojave, please link to the Apple security announcement.

Where are the Mojave fixes for CVE-2019-8745 and CVE-2019-8769 for example? If they're not available, my point stands.

The SwiftUI development tools (live preview) are only available in Catalina, and iTunes has had a minor rewrite I believe. Otherwise, I think it’s the same.

How would I stay on Mojave when my laptop breaks? Do you expect people to keep buying old hardware forever?

Why not? What's the alternative, that Apple has to support all of your old software forever in the free software updates that they provide?

Yep, Apple should spend some of that massive pile of cash they have. It's the least they can do.

Run your old apps in a VM.

That can result in anything between "works with some inconvenience" and "does not work at all".

If it continues to work, why not? I have Windows audio apps from the 90s and they still run fine.

I know many, many working artists and illustrators that plan to do exactly that. Artists generally revile Adobe for their move to subscription pricing.

This idea that "6+" years old is particularly old really irks me, because it's not. Most other things in my life that I rely on last longer than that. I also occasionally need to run software that's older than that.

6 years isn't nearly long enough to even consider dropping support on the OS level. Try twice that.

Apple is not looking at 6 year old applications and saying “It’s been long enough, time to drop support for this app”. They are looking at the 30+ year old architecture that is 32-bit x86.

Who cares? At the end of the day, what matters is people’s stuff that they paid for is broken.

That’s a rather simplistic view of things. The long and the short of it is this; it’s not Apple’s responsibility to to ensure Adobe’s software runs on their platform, it’s Adobe’s and Adobe no longer support CS6.

What is a computer if not a place for software to run on? Is it not part of the producer's responsibility to make sure software runs fine on their platform? The bond goes both ways.

Simply put, no! Certainly not if the developer of the non-functioning software no-longer supports it.

Look, everyone knows how Apple rolls when it comes to operating systems--they kill old APIs, frameworks, and even entire classes of apps on a pretty regular basis.

No mainstream operating system that ran on 68000 processors in the 80's, PowerPC in the 90's and Intel since 2006 is even around today.

Y’all must have forgot how NeXTStep, which later became Mac OS X and now macOS ran on 68000, Sparc and MIPS back in the day.

The same way Apple was running Mac OS X on Intel hardware long before the first Intel Macs were released, there's got to be Arm-based MacBooks or Mac minis running macOS right now.

So it makes sense for Apple to get rid of as much technical debt as they can before making that jump.

And because of Catalyst, which enables iPad apps to be ported to macOS, there will be more apps for the Mac.

Some of the Catalyst apps have some rough edges and not all of the frameworks are available yet, but things look promising: https://9to5mac.com/2019/10/07/macos-catalina-catalyst-apps/.

Finally, Apple has been telling developers since Snow Leopard was released in 2009 about transitioning to 64-bit.

> Look, everyone knows how Apple rolls when it comes to operating systems--they kill old APIs, frameworks, and even entire classes of apps on a pretty regular basis.

Every platform has to balance the developer experience with the user experience. Microsoft, with their incredible backwards compatibility support, has one approach, whereas Apple has a very different one.

There is no right or wrong way.

It’s more the 20-year old Carbon API set (parts of which are 30+ years old like QuickDraw) than x86 itself. Apple doesn’t get to drop x86 support from Intel’s silicon (like they did with 32-bit ARM on iOS).

adobe has essentially added nothing in cc that makes it worthwhile to switch over from cs6, and certainly not for rental software. if anything performance has gotten considerably worse with the addition of creative cloud bloatware

Apple did not break your working software. It still runs on older versions of the OS.

Let's face it you are cheap, you weren't willing to keep up with the Adobe products you purchased and now you want to blame someone, instead of blaming yourself, you've decided it's someone else's fault.

I have pre-CC version of the Adobe products, and I run the an older version of OSX on my Mac Pro. I'm not willing to pay the price for Adobe, but I'm also willing to take responsibility for my cheapness.

> Let's face it you are cheap,

Or, hear me out here, some people can’t afford to buy new Adobe software because it’s ridiculously expensive. They’re not wealthy enough to call themselves cheap.

Again, being angry at an OS vendor because Adobe overprices their software doesn't make sense.

Or you can treat both as part of the same engine of unrestrained, destructive capitalism that destroys people's livelihoods when they no longer align with business interests.

Apple can spend some of that massive cash reserve it has actually acting like a grown-up platform holder with responsibilities to its users.

When an OS vendor breaks something that works perfect for me before, I think I have a right to be at least 70% angry at them.

I can still run programs from the XP era on my Windows PC.

You can just stay on Mojave. You don't have to update.

Calling someone cheap is not helpful in discussions like this, and really undermine your arguments.

You should be mad at the company with the bigger market cap, which isn't Adobe.

that's a weird criterion. market cap has little to nothing to do with it. I don't think it's reasonable to be mad at anyone in this particular situation - we all knew that 32-bit was going away - but there are certainly other reasons to be disappointed by both Apple and Adobe separately.

Apple broke it, but you can’t bring yourself to criticize your beloved?

Would you also be mad when Apple dropped support for classic Mac OS and Word 4.0 didn’t work?

No but I am mad at Microsoft for Word 6.0

I just want Word 5.1 back. Is that too much to ask?

There is room in my heart to be furious at both.

Adobe's cloud pricing model is abhorrent to me, and Apple forcing the hand of everyone that didn't want to jump on board with it is also shitty.

But I've had a long time to come to grips with my hatred for Adobe. Apple has only recently started making choices that carry serious negative consequences for me.

I feel the same way about their dropping of OpenGL, for what it's worth.

If you could run an old Adobe offering for 6 years, why do you feel forced by Apple right now to upgrade your OS (and hence SW)? Couldn’t you easily stick to Mojave for two more years - or run Mojave and your old SW in a VM? I don‘t see how Apple is forcing you in October 2019 to do anything that costs money. 2021 perhaps, but that’s a long way until then.

It is very much worth looking at Photoshop alternatives every so often. Pixelmator Pro is very good.

It's a perfectly reasonable thing to be mad about, since wanting to use an older version of software is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. 6 years isn't even that long of a time either.

This comment is a perfect illustration of the bizarre irrationality people have when discussing Apple.

Yes. I've been involved with the Mac user group community for many years; this is the kind of logic I've heard many times.

Why would you switch the OS you're running?

Snow Leopard for life! The OS and the hardware it ran on, still run that Adobe release now just as well as they did then.

I'm not sure the treadmill has resulted in things feeling importantly different for standard tools over the last 10 - 15 years.

My next Hackintosh will be Mavericks. I'm going to use ESXi so hardware compatibility is less of an issue.

I'd love to do Snow Leopard instead but tracking down old software that's compatible has proven difficult. I'm convinced it's out there—iffy backwards compatibility means there shouldn't necessarily be fewer compatible apps, just different ones—it's just tracking them down in 2019 that's a problem. Mavericks is my compromise.

> Why would you switch the OS you're running? Snow Leopard for life!

Because Snow Leopard is full of unpatched security holes. [0] Including RCEs.

[0] https://wyzguyscybersecurity.com/apple-patched-safari-and-os...

Snow Leopard was tongue in cheek as it comes up among OSX fans as the best OS made.

To your point, there are plenty newer MacOS versions that might still suit ones taste, still run 32 bit apps, and still get patched.

There are plenty alternatives to surfing Safari. Heck, you can even get modern Firefox compiled for Power Macintosh G3, G4, or G5 (not for Lion 10.7 or newer, which dropped Power Mac support): https://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

iCab (at icab.de) is another labor of love, though release notes look like 2018.

Sites like Low End Mac help find things that can live on (example 2015 article, though incomplete and dated): https://lowendmac.com/2015/what-is-the-best-browser-for-os-x...

Note, TenFourFox isn't quite "modern Firefox", it's a fork of an old version with backported fixes and improvements. And on Snow Leopard (which only supports Intel), you'd want to use Arctic Fox instead: https://github.com/wicknix/Arctic-Fox.

> To your point, there are plenty newer MacOS versions that might still suit ones taste, still run 32 bit apps, and still get patched.

Where "plenty" equals "two", sure. Apple releases security patches for the last three Mac releases. So, High Sierra has one year left, and Mojave has two years.

If you are happy to run old Adobe pre-CC applications why would you not consider to stay on 10.14 as well?

It's the same logic.

Because Apple will stop supplying security updates?

Is Adobe updating the pre-cc‘s? I mean security wise. Acrobat‘s vulnerability’s come to mind.

Edit: I’m pretty sure my 10.13(!) received a security update last month. There will be security updates for 10.14 at least till next years macOS flavor.

Mojave support ends in September 2021. You can still run your 32 bit Adobe apps with free security updates until then. That will have given you at least 10 years of use from your Adobe Suite purchase.

(After that time the apps will still run like they always did, but you may choose to keep that machine offline for security reasons).

I tend to think that's a pretty reasonable value for your money.

Adobe have already done that for Photoshop CS6...

I recently got Affinity Designer and Publisher, each for $39 during a promotion this summer; the regular price is $49. If you look at the specs for Designer, it makes Adobe look kind of bad in comparison: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/full-feature-list/

Also, the non-Adobe Mac graphics software market is pretty robust, with Acorn, Pixelmator, Polarr Photo Editor, CorelDraw, etc.

I've been an Acorn user for years; has all of the important features of Photoshop in a much more accessible interface for a fraction of the price. Just checked—it's on sale for $14.99: https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

Probably a good 1/4 of these apps are either obsolete, or no one should really be running them, anyway. The only thing that stuck out to me was 1Password.

It's 1Password 2.12.2, which is almost 10 years old.

Apple might think it can get away with removing the 3.5mm audio jack or restricting iOS users to only one app store or not allowing flash content on iOS Safari etc., but they sure as hell can't get away with such ridiculous changes when it comes to macOS pro users. What is Apple thinking, really? They might be able to start a global change in the mobile industry because they own a huge market share there, but when it comes to computers, they're not in a position to dictate to developers what they can run on their machines and what they can't. The more it goes, the more of a toy MBP becomes, both hardware- and software-wise. I'm seriously considering switching back to Windows, which is sad.

2019 and you're still bringing up Flash ?

And if you do own a Mac which I highly doubt you would know that nothing really has changed. I can still run the apps I want. I can still use Homebrew to install CLI tools and libraries. I still don't need to use the App Store.

The only difference is that they finally got rid of 32-bit support which was a decision years in the making.

I don't have to prove to you that I own a Mac. Plus, bringing up flash was to further explain my point, which is, Apple getting rid of certain technologies in the computer sector as if they are the leader of the market which they are not. They already are struggling to keep their current users, and a move like this (getting rid of 32-bit apps) further decreases their market share.

> Plus, bringing up flash was to further explain my point, which is, Apple getting rid of certain technologies in the computer sector as if they are the leader of the market which they are not

I'm not sure the Flash argument really supports that point honestly. Leader of the market or not, Apple's refusal to support Flash on iOS was a major contributor to Flash's slide into irrelevance.

Although it would have probably happened anyway considering that Flash for Android was briefly a thing, and very much did prove the hypothesis that Flash on low powered mobile devices was a terrible idea.

If they get rid of tech, and they're not the leader in the market, well, it's their minority market share, their minority revenue, and as a non-monopoly, they have every right.

No one said they don't have the right to do that. The discussion here is how that affects people who are using their devices and how much unnecessary problems they are now facing.

None at all if you keep using what worked when you got the devices and apps. If it’s not obsolete (the general argument here), don’t replace the OS under it.

> a move like this (getting rid of 32-bit apps) further decreases their market share.

Bullshit.

More than 99% of users don't care about 32-bit support. 64-bit has been available for 12 years (since Leopard), and most of the industry (and users) has moved forward.

Apple has been doing it for years, and every time they remove cruft people like you start predicting their doom. But pissing off that 1% of users has been pretty much their only winning strategy.

You seem unable to keep the discussion civilized. But for those who might read this later, the list of 235 apps that are incompatible with the new macOS version disproves your argument.

That list proves nothing without information on the number of people using the listed software. My guess is a list of users affected wouldn't be much longer than this list.

So yeah, I agree with regarding the cow stuff.

If you have a Citi credit card like I do, virtual credit card numbers inexplicably require Flash.

I'm not saying this is reasonable, but the death of Flash seems to be very painful and drawn out and not quite over yet. It's projected to be completely discontinued next year, but for now, I think people can bring it up.

Speaking as a tech guy at a behemoth bank, that's pretty much on us banks. (And I know the UI you're talking about.)

I would guess these apps are insecure in some way.

I've been a loyal Apple user for 20 years, and in my experience every decision Apple makes is based on extremely logical and intelligent reasons though they don't always publish said reasons.

But I would suspect macOS is the most advanced OS ever designed because of the little things like this that put it a cut above the trainwreck that is Windows 10 or Linux. You gotta cut out the cancer before it ruins your platform.

It's got nothing to do with security. These (versions of) apps do not include 64-bit builds, which is required for Catalina support.

Well, like I said, cutting out the cruft. 32-bit is obsolete - it's 2019 for heaven's sake. Maybe these companies will put forth more of an effort to keep their software up to snuff.

Unlikely. Speaking for myself, I have decided to drop support for MacOS starting with Catalina. I might still provide an experimental built, but it's just too much of a pain in the ass to support the platform long-term. I've been doing this for 20 years and almost every OS upgrade there is some kind of trouble or unnecessary things to do. I'm not in it for the money anyway, but to be honest, I really doubt that MacOS support is worth it for most small companies.

We've supported some products that have been on the MacOS platform since the late 1980s. Catalina compatibility is not going to happen and there will be no further development. It's been too much time treading water and hasn't been profitable for sometime even though we are the preeminent application in our domain and none of our competitors are replacements. Customers have been, are, and will be following us to the Windows version.

Good software takes 10 years. Great software takes 20 years.

If you have to spend all your time rewriting though just to stay in place it never gets great. Instead you just introduce instabilities and incompatibilities for no good reason other than fashion and hardware sales for a competitor.

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