Hacker News Reader

Comment by neoglow | Hacker News Reader

What's even more frustrating was the removal of 32-bit apps in Catalina and the continued deprecation of OpenGL. So many functional apps where the developers have lost interest are now non-functional. Not to even start on the irritating, vista-like security prompts for apps that are not signed (which in development is a lot...).

MacOS has become less and less pleasant to use in that last 3 to 5 years for me as a developer, because of this. Which is such a shame, because the new Macbook Pro's are really amazing machines, hardware-wise. Great keyboard, Magsafe, no Touchbar, amazing screen and great battery life.

I will be requesting a Linux (or Windows.. whatever) laptop at work if this one dies.

View on HN

There is literally no hardware support for 32 bit apps in the latest ARM processors. The die space was used for something more useful.

I will take Metal over Khronos APIs any day of the week, if Khronos would be doing the Internet, all we would have as standard would be IP protocol, with everything else as custom extensions.

The Khronos APIs are the ones I have more experience with, and it pains me that all these years it stays as kind of initialiation ritual to go through all the things they miss versus proprietary APIs.

Everyone has to write their own mini-engine with their APIs.

If not for the removal of 32-bit apps, we would not have ARM chips in our computers. What do you think of Microsoft's depreciation of 32-bit?

What are some of these interesting, unmaintained 32-bit apps you speak of?

If you're asking this question and not a Mac user I'll eat my Macbook.

start eating

They're an Objective C developer, so no, I won't. It's a very typical Apple device user response of 'why would you want to do that?' epitomised by Jobs' 'you're holding it wrong' advice.

The most painful one for me: https://wxtoimgrestored.xyz

Samsung Easy Document Creator scanner app.

With it, I could at least scan. Image Capture/Preview just produce invalid files. (Samsung M2070w). Now to scan I have to use Linux or Windows machine.

What do you mean by invalid files? I never had a problem with Preview scanner.

You can also try VueScan, which is a spartan UI, but works great.

Invalid files as in it creates PDF, but it is not valid PDF and it will fail to open. When trying to scan into TIFF, it will crash.

It is pretty much device specific; an HP MFP at home works fine. The Samsung app was an workaround, but it was pretty obvious that nobody is going to fix Image Capture.

The only Steam game in my library that still works now is Myst.

The list of Steam games that even supported macOS at all was already quite short, but now Portal, Portal 2, Team Fortress, the entire Half-Life series, and quite a few others will no longer run.

The switch to Apple silicon machines also makes running them in a VM tricky. Even though Windows supports running x86 code on Arm hardware, the mix of architectures inside the VM creates new problems, particularly for Steam.

Nomenclature wise, those are games, not exactly apps. What are some applications that are missing?

Tascam us-122mkII support was dropped. It is ancient, but it still works and there was a Windows 10 driver. I just got a cheaper Behringer uphoria that uses standard USB audio (or whatever) but loosing the Tascam was annoying.

new mbp has touchbar.

Not really. The last hold out is the 13”, but that design has not changed since it was Intel based. The 14 and 16” versions have no touchbar and I would guess the 13” won’t either on the next redesign.

i hadn't noticed that, good eye.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com