Hacker News Reader

Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

The writing that 32bit apps are going away was on the wall for a long time. If you still rely on that (maybe for some enterprise application) then you are probably not going to upgrade to the newest version right away anyway.

It’s like removing the floppy drive, there will be a bunch of people complaining (probably the 1%) who still use it but in the end everyone is better of without it and it will be replaced by something better.

Almost nobody of the general users would know a difference between 32 / 64 bit as they just use new apps or use web apps. It’s a very small group that’s affected by this change.

View on HN

The writing has been on the wall for a long time but some big name software companies are slow to adapt, and even if they adapted you'll probably have to pay good money for a new license.

Take Mathematica for example. The first 64-bit version is 12.0, released April 2019. So a year-old permanent v11 license is useless on Catalina now. It would have cost me a couple hundred bucks to upgrade my v9 permanent license if I didn't happen to have an institutional license.

Sounds like you ought to get mad at Mathematica for selling 32bit MacOS software in 2019, which it's been well known for over a decade that support will eventually be dropped.

Hardly been "well known for over a decade". A decade ago, Rosetta was well-supported. The dropping of Rosetta support in Lion was quasi-abrupt, but understandable (it arose from a licensing concern after the tech was acquired). The 32/64 transition was announced a few years ago, but it was hardly something known a decade ago.

The history of Apple suggests that when they come out with a new development environment, it is well advised to just go ahead an make that switch as soon as possible. Even if they make a bandaid type of stepping stone like Rosetta, don't lean on it permanently. Adobe had to skip an entire version of their software suite because they didn't believe Apple was serious.

The last 32 bit Mac was released in 2007.

If the last 32 bit Mac that Apple shipped was over a decade ago, why wouldn’t you port your code to 64 bit?

What wrong with running decade old software? What if the company is long gone? Apple is forcing me to never upgrade.

In the grand scheme of things, how many companies do you think wrote software for the Intel based Mac between the beginning of 2006 when the first Intel based Macs were introduced and 2009 when Apple dropped support for 32 bit Macs and then went out of business?

Sounds like an even better reason to force their hand. If it was left to companies, they would still be shipping software with 68K code.

> If it was left to companies, they would still be shipping software with 68K code.

You seem to think that would be a bad thing. Why?

The operating system is there to support applications.

Every piece of code in an operating system means a larger surface area for vulnerabilities, more support cost, more maintenance for both developers and the operating system maintainers, etc.

If you want to see how badly this can go wrong - look at Windows. Over a decade ago there were over a half a dozen different ways to represent a string in Windows and depending on which API you called, you had to translate between them.

Also, one of the earliest widespread vulnerabilities was caused by IIS not checking all of the different types of string encodings. You could literally pass DOS commands via the url bar just by encoding them and they would run on the server.

The logical extension of this belief is to just turn the computer off. That way it's not running any code and is 100% secure.

In the real world there are trade offs. This is engineering 101.

Find me a perpetual license for a version of Adobe Lightroom that has a 64-bit installer and I'll pay for it. But I'm not going to upgrade to a leased tool. Luckily the perpetual Lightroom licenses work on Windows too, so when Mavericks loses support I'll probably migrate at least the photography workflows to wine (on not-macOS though).

What perpetual license? If you buy a copy of something like CC suite, it was for that current version. If Adobe updates a major upgrade (not point releases), they charged you again for the upgrade. That was usually 12-18 months. That was also $999 for those upgrades. Sure, you could stay on that version, but as the OS upgrades, that code becomes unusable forcing the upgrade. The "lease" licenses is $50/month or $600/yr (usually comes with a discount for the 12month purchase). You get access to the upgrades as they come so you're always current. Where's the evil? Oh, and with that $50/month, I can run it on 2 separate computers simultaneously. The original license was for one computer.

The perpetual license to use the software in the version you bought. Few people truly needed every single version, but instead only upgraded when it became necessary or there was a killer feature they wanted.

You're simply forgetting the fact that as the OS upgrades, the software that is not upgraded cannot be used without also upgrading. What's the last OS that CS6 could be installed?

Also, anyone using Adobe software in a professional setting (meaning actually getting paid for using the software) can easily pay the monthly fees. Staying on an antiquated version of software means they can no longer open files that are created on recent versions of software (thinking Premiere). I have not met one professional that is still holding on to the perpetual license fallacy. The maths just don't add up.

at least Photoshop CS6 runs perfectly fine on a current Windows 10 (I suspect it wouldn't do good with a high-DPI screen though), but I agree that going all the way back to that today is not really something you'd do for regular professional use. Of course, not everyone is a professional user.

That said, freelancers I know using Adobe software have to keep old versions around because clients don't upgrade. People are even now skipping or lagging versions, because they'd rather stay with a version they know works than invite new bugs by upgrading.

> at least Photoshop CS6 runs perfectly fine on a current Windows 10

And on Mojave, by the way. It's only this stupid 32 bit thing that's killing it in Catalina.

> but I agree that going all the way back to that today is not really something you'd do for regular professional use.

Why? Adobe hasn't added anything particularly significant since CS6.

(And I don't think it's a coincidence that they moved to a subscription model around the same time they stopped making significant improvements.)

I think it goes without saying that not everyone that buys software is a professional, and instead wish to use it a few times per year for job adjacent functions or as a hobbyist. For the "few times a year" folks, maybe "one month at a time is annoying but reasonable enough."

Hobbyists, though, are in a bad spot.

I’d love to see professional licenses switch to a “maximally fair to the user subscription model”.

If you use the thing in a given month, you autopay the monthly subscription fee — if you don’t use it at all in a given month — you pay nothing.

people who use the software regularly pay basically the current subscription pricing model — but if you only use it very occasionally — you pay much less.

I think this kind of pricing model could really help drive adoption of subscription pricing for professional tools ... I’d be willing to maintain a subscription to several expensive infrequently used by me tools with this kind of pricing model — and I might occasionally use those tools which would be better for the developer than me never using their tool at all ...

I'd like that too, although the pricing steps are an interesting challenge: You want to make the full amount of regular users, but don't want the casual users to think "if I click this icon now to touch one file, it's gonna cost me 20 bucks", so you might need even more granular steps. E.g. a month costs the same as 1/10th of a year, a day costs the same as 1/8th of a month -> if you use it >8 days in a month it caps to the month, if you use it >10 months it caps to the year. Kind of like some public transport network cards work.

Also, anyone using Adobe software in a professional setting (meaning actually getting paid for using the software) can easily pay the monthly fees.

Even if I were getting paid for my photography, why would I want to pay extra fees?

Staying on an antiquated version of software means they can no longer open files that are created on recent versions of software (thinking Premiere).

In the case of Lightroom the only thing that's going to "upgrade" your file format is a new camera body, and that's not something I do all that much. I don't need to open files from people with newer cameras. And, let's face it, if I really need to open newer raw files I can use Adobe's DNG converter.

Lightroom 6 is a 64-bit app with a 32-bit installer. Newer versions of LR offer up a ton of cloud shit I don't want, bundled with more seamless integration for newer cameras I don't own. What am I getting out of monthly payments to Adobe?

The past few upgrades to Lightroom that I've bought were around $80. Well less than a year of the cheapest CC subscription.

Mavericks has been out of support for 3 years JFYI

Mavericks has been out of support for 3 years JFYI

Sorry I meant Mojave or whatever 10.14 is called.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com