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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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