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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

Is that even a serious criticism? Users had about ten years of warning before 32-bit went away. The real impact of that on real users is minimal.

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There are some non-trivial apps used by real users that are 32-bit only, in particular the pre-subscription versions of Adobe Creative Suite.

And those aren’t the worst examples, as alternatives exist (subscription only and/or more expensive, possibly, but they do exist)

Especially in companies, there may be that ‘essential’ app somebody wrote in two decades ago that nobody has the source code to or, if they have, uses a language dialect no modern compiler supports, requires third party libraries of companies long out of business, etc.

Also, hardware support may be an issue. Expensive hardware can have long lifetimes, and hardware companies tend to be bad at upgrading drivers order hardware they don’t sell anymore.

Those companies should pay the developers of those “essential” apps for the update. I’m tired of companies cheeping out and blaming everyone else when they don’t want to pay devs.

And real users can keep running that old software on real similarly-old computers. I don't think the number of still-functional old Macs is so small that they're going to be impossible to find any time soon.

I can understand being unhappy that Adobe doesn't offer an upgrade path from an obsolete version of CS to similar licensing terms for a modern version that runs on modern computers. But I think that complaint should be directed at Adobe, not Apple.

So end-of-life releases that have been replaced with newer builds? Any application that doesn't survive the progression of technology doesn't deserve to-- software requires maintenance. We expect hardware to get bigger/faster/stronger but are unwilling to hold software to the same standard?

I am wracking my brain but cannot think of a single application that I ran on previous epochs of hardware (whether it be 32bit, PowerPC, Itanium, or anything else) that I am now missing out on.FOSS has really mitigated this a ton too because if there was a good idea from a defunct codebase, inevitably a project would spring up to fill that void.

Professionally, legacy software is the bane of my existence because I am expected to move heaven and earth to make crappy, long outdated and inherently insecure proprietary enterprise apps work on modern networks with modern operating systems and modern security requirements. Let it all burn.

Software that runs perfectly fine, performs just what I need, and that I already paid for, that has no security implications... and you want me to now start paying monthly for the privilege of using the same software. No thanks.

I know software requires maintenance. When it’s cheaper to buy another computer that runs the old software just fine than paying for “updates” and “improvements” and “bug fixes” that do nothing for me, I think people are going to stop paying for such “updates”.

And a massive chunk of Steam library which will never be updated.

Yes, there were warnings, but what can I as a user do about it? I am impacted by 32 bit going away and I cannot do anything about it. That is why I am running Mojava instead of Catalina. On the bright side, whenever I am going to buy a new Mac, the ARM processor effectively doesn't cause any additional troubles on the compatibility side, and that was probably the reason for Apple to kill 32 bit with Catalina.

But there is something you can do about it. You're already doing it. You can run Mojave.

You want the platform to be weighed down with cruft forever because of a 0.01% use case? Do you want 8-bit support in there too, for the 68000?

68000 Mac apps were never 8 bit, the CPU had a 24-bit address space!

I'm sorry. Thank you for the correction.

> Users had about ten years of warning before 32-bit went away.

Citation needed. I remember 32 bit being deprecated just 12 months before its support removal and there were no signs earlier. I just had to recompile my apps to x64, but some 3rd party tools I use never got an update and my 2013 Macbook will stay on Mojave forever.

64-bit apps debuted something like 12 years ago on the Mac. The writing has thus been on the wall for circa a decade, as I said. You figured 32-bit would be supported for what, 20 years? 30?

> The writing has thus been on the wall for circa a decade, as I said.

So do you say that there is writing on the wall for removing 32-bit support in Windows and Linux too? I certainly don't. If Apple deprecated 32-bit while introducing x64 then the writing would be on the wall but they kept supporting and updating 32-bit.

> You figured 32-bit would be supported for what, 20 years? 30?

At least one hardware generation lifetime from moment of deprecation (5 years would be bad, 10 would be great). There were 32-bit AU plugins still being sold in 2018 and some of them never got an update. KORG never updated some of their synth control apps for synthesisers that are still on sale - they just updated docs and wrote that macOS is not supported anymore.

I saw someone post on a non work slack about their steam library, where they had a bunch of games that previously ran on mac, being decimated, and they meant decimated literally by catalina. 90% of their games were 32 bit.

The good news for steam users is that you don’t have to purchase the game separately for each platform. The decimated users can build their own Windows gaming PC and easily regain access to all of their old games. I doubt they had any Mac-exclusive games that also happened to be 32-bit only. Do such games even exist? Maybe.

Funnily enough that is the inverse of the historical meaning of decimated (to destroy 10% of something).

Good to know, thanks.

Sounds like the writing is on the wall for 32bit linux but you still have some time.

https://ubuntu.com/blog/statement-on-32-bit-i386-packages-fo...

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