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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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".

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.

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