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What apple should do is automatically cross recompile the old apps to work on the new hardware. There are a lot of old apps that are excellent but will never get updated, a great many for small business, games and a huge inventory of educational applications. Nobody else will bother to write a replacement but cause the original creator was inspired and it is a small market in many cases. Yet, they are still great apps. Apple is doing this again on both iOS and MacOS. This same problem has happened before when Apple abandoned earlier MacOS versions. They are nearly a trillion dollar company. They could easily put forth the effort to bring the old apps, all the way back to the Lisa, onto the modern operating systems with recompiling. Shame on Apple for creating deadwood.

For those who think it's too hard a problem, you're wrong. I'm a programmer and have written both compilers and cross compilers. You don't need the source code. If you have the final program you can run it through a cross compiler, a just-in-time compiler or just emulate to run it on different hardware. That list is in order of efficiency and preference. This is not a hard task. Apple has done it before.

Apple should be interested in doing this is it adds value for their customers because the software you use today will run tomorrow and because it maximizes the Apple application ecosystem which Apple likes to crow about in their marketing materials, ads, etc.

With the extraordinary computing power of todays devices this is all very easy and even emulated software can run faster than it did on the original hardware.

Imagine a world where all your old books, music, photos and other documents are no longer accessible because Apple and other companies drop support.

It is time for two pieces of legislation:
1) If a company or an individual wants to release a program they must also accept that their copyright and patents end within two years of their stopping supporting the software. Same thing for hardware. In other words, shorten the protection time dramatically. This will make it so other people can pickup the product and support it if they want to as fans or as another vendor.

2) If a company is above a certain threshold, which should be very low, then they must also release the supporting documentations for source code, maintenance, etc so that other people can pick it up.

3) If a company is at the high level of Google, Microsoft, Sun, Apple and the like then they must continue to offer legacy support for a minimum of 50 years in addition to #1 and #2 above.

1) That would be a brilliant way to stifle innovation by turning everything a programmer or hardware designer creates into a big old millstone around their neck. Most two-year old apps and hardware will still work fine, even without any fiddling or updates. If failing to meet some indeterminate standard for "supporting" that thing means they'll lose all rights to it, then instead of spending resources to innovate new stuff, they'll be spending all their time "supporting" legacy stuff.

2) That's just insane. First, who's going to keep track of all that? There's a huge number of small-time and even amateur programmers out there who create apps and move on to other things in their lives. If somebody 20 years later wants the source code and supporting documentation for a 99-cent app somebody wrote once, who's going to find the author, and who's going to make that author go find their source code, if they even still have it somewhere?
What if they don't have it, or don't want to make the effort to look for it? Do they get fined? Do they go to jail?

Who is going to want to try their hand at programming or creating anything if doing so saddles them with what amounts to a lifetime obligation to support it or keep records and files?

3) That's even more insane. The Apple I was created 41 years ago, and discontinued a year later, by a two-guys-in-a-garage company. How is it reasonable to expect them to be responsible to "support" that machine? Ford is an enormous company, but they have no responsibility to continue making parts for and trouble-shooting any problems you might be having with your 1973 Pinto.

A critical part of both human growth and technological innovation is a willingness to make a clean break with the old in order to focus on the new. Saddling innovators with an automatic 50-year responsibility to fully support everything they create is a good way to kill off innovation. For any company that is less than 50 years old, your "law" would require them to intentionally commit less and less over time to creating new things, because they must commit more and more to supporting the old stuff. Using your vision for things, Apple would now mostly be a big repair shop, instead of a company creating innovative new tech. (Except they'd probably just go out of business, because that's just not a sustainable way to operate a company.)
 
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Seoras is blissfully unaware that this is a macOS thread not iOS. ;) I use some small tools like AppCleaner, CheatSheet, etc that I'm guessing aren't 64bit. Is there a quick way of checking?
From Apple menu, choose "About this Mac". Click System Report. One of the choices in the app is "Applications" which lists all your applications and shows if they are 64 bit or not. (I was shocked at how many apps I depend on are 32 bit.)
 
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What apple should do is automatically cross recompile the old apps to work on the new hardware. There are a lot of old apps that are excellent but will never get updated, a great many for small business, games and a huge inventory of educational applications. Nobody else will bother to write a replacement but cause the original creator was inspired and it is a small market in many cases. Yet, they are still great apps. Apple is doing this again on both iOS and MacOS. This same problem has happened before when Apple abandoned earlier MacOS versions. They are nearly a trillion dollar company. They could easily put forth the effort to bring the old apps, all the way back to the Lisa, onto the modern operating systems with recompiling. Shame on Apple for creating deadwood.

(1) Apple doesn't have the source code for "the old apps" - it doesn't even get the source code for apps sold in the Mac App Store.

(2) A lot of the not-so-old apps still distributed in 32 bit use Carbon. If Apple wanted to make this transition easier, they'd release a 64 bit Carbon set of libraries. But they won't.
 
What was the 32 bit Mac product Apple was selling in 2014? All Macs were transitioned to 64 bit by 2007.

They were selling the iPhone 5C well into 2015, which has a 32-Bit processor. I didn't mention Mac, just said Apple were selling 32-Bit products 3 years ago.
 
From Apple menu, choose "About this Mac". Click System Report. One of the choices in the app is "Applications" which lists all your applications and shows if they are 64 bit or not. (I was shocked at how many apps I depend on are 32 bit.)
Thanks. I should have known that.
 
They were selling the iPhone 5C well into 2015, which has a 32-Bit processor. I didn't mention Mac, just said Apple were selling 32-Bit products 3 years ago.
That's true, but this thread is about macOS, not iPhones.
 
People who havel lost 32 bit programs on their laptop and desktop computers and spent hundreds or thousands of dollars buying that software have a valid complaint, although I would say it's with the software company since Apple said, years ago, that 32 bit software was going to be obsolete.

Cell phone software that is frequently obsolete once 1 or 2 OS updates are installed, no matter who's phone or which OS (Android, IOS, Windows), not so sympathetic.
 
Sorry, this is random but why do I see only one new post on the site? The rest are from March and last year
 
I wish all the perpetual whingers in this thread who keep threatening to move to Linux or Windows would just do it already and leave the rest of us in peace.

Some Linux distros are planning to phase out 64-bit support too. Within two years, macOS is certainly not alone.
 
Some Linux distros are planning to phase out 32-bit support too. Within two years, macOS is certainly not alone.
True, but in the case of Linux you can just switch to another distro. I don't think Linus will be dropping i686 support from the kernel any time soon...
 
At least it's better than the phasing out of PowerPC apps, Lion decided to just drop support for them out of nowhere without any warning, when Snow Leopard was the first system that was only compatible with Intel. Considering that Lion and newer systems require a 64-bit Mac, I think we got plenty of time to phase out 32-bit apps.
The last release that provided legacy support for PowerPC apps was OS X 10.5 Leopard which was compatible with both PPC and Intel architectures. It is only using Rosetta PowerPC apps could be run on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
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True, but in the case of Linux you can just switch to another distro. I don't think Linus will be dropping i686 support from the kernel any time soon...
True but 32-bit architecture is now outdated in fact it has been for some years now. There will come a time when only lightweight Linux distributions developed for older Hardware will be available for 32-bit architecture such as Puppy Linux.
 
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I have software that's been updated in the past month that's still 32 bits.

This is exactly why Apple should do this, IMO. Apple has supported 64-bit for almost 15 years now and there are developers who are still distributing 32-bit-only software to users with 64-bit capable CPUs (which is probably more than 99% of total Mac users). These developers will likely never make this transition without some external pressure, which would mean that Apple has to support 32-bit in perpetuity until it no longer supports CPUs that are even capable of running 32-bit code. There will never be the ‘right’ moment for Apple without affecting users.

Apple gives us advance notice. High Sierra is the last release with full compatibility, 10.14 probably drops some deprecated libraries (maybe Carbon) and shows warnings to the user. 10.15 or later will then remove 32-bit support, maybe not even fully. Consider that you can use each version for up to three years with security support and you are looking for at least three or four more years of support as of this autumn. More than reasonable to me.

True, but in the case of Linux you can just switch to another distro. I don't think Linus will be dropping i686 support from the kernel any time soon...

I am not so sure about that. How many distros are independent enough to provide that support? How many users would care to compile the software themselves if required to?

The deprecation happens due to cost/benefit reasons, those likely apply to smaller distros too. The kernel itself is a lot more flexible.
 
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32-bit architecture is now outdated in fact it has been for some years now.
I'm not disagreeing with that. I was just saying that the Linux kernel will probably support x86 for a long time. The ancient Intel i386/80386 finally got dropped in 2012.

I am not so sure about that. How many distros are independent enough to provide that support? How many users would care to compile the software themselves if required to?
Ubuntu is talking about dropping 32bit support, but I would be very surprised if Debian (Ubuntu's parent distribution), did any time soon. Even 64-bit focused distros like RHEL7/CentOS ship 32bit compatibility libs.
 
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I'm not disagreeing with that. I was just saying that the Linux kernel will probably support x86 for a long time. The ancient Intel i386/80386 finally got dropped in 2012.


Ubuntu is talking about dropping 32bit support, but I would be very surprised if Debian, its parent distro, did any time soon. Even 64-bit focused distros like RHEL7/CentOS ship 32bit compatibility libs.
Major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Mint, openSUSE, Fedora etc. are just as resource hungry as proprietary systems these days. 32-bit Hardware tops out at just 3GB Ram whereas with 64-bit the amount of RAM is only limited to the constraints of the Motherboard and CPU.
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This is exactly why Apple should do this, IMO. Apple has supported 64-bit for almost 15 years now and there are developers who are still distributing 32-bit-only software to users with 64-bit capable CPUs (which is probably more than 99% of total Mac users). These developers will likely never make this transition without some external pressure, which would mean that Apple has to support 32-bit in perpetuity until it no longer supports CPUs that are even capable of running 32-bit code. There will never be the ‘right’ moment for Apple without affecting users.

Apple gives us advance notice. High Sierra is the last release with full compatibility, 10.14 probably drops some deprecated libraries (maybe Carbon) and shows warnings to the user. 10.15 or later will then remove 32-bit support, maybe not even fully. Consider that you can use each version for up to three years with security support and you are looking for at least three or four more years of support as of this autumn. More than reasonable to me.



I am not so sure about that. How many distros are independent enough to provide that support? How many users would care to compile the software themselves if required to?

The deprecation happens due to cost/benefit reasons, those likely apply to smaller distros too. The kernel itself is a lot more flexible.

It can be no more of a wrench than when Apple switched from PPC to Intel.
 
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Apple gives us advance notice. High Sierra is the last release with full compatibility, 10.14 probably drops some deprecated libraries (maybe Carbon) and shows warnings to the user. 10.15 or later will then remove 32-bit support, maybe not even fully. Consider that you can use each version for up to three years with security support and you are looking for at least three or four more years of support as of this autumn. More than reasonable to me.

They kill Carbon, they lose a number of developers, and lose the users who depend on those programs.
 
No loss - Developers still using Carbon should get crucified...
Yeah, Apple doesn't need those customers who depend on those apps. And those Enterprises using custom apps, screw the Enterprises, Apple doesn't need their money.
 
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That was nothing, absolutely nothing compared with the unalloyed outpouring of grief when Apple unceremoniously dumped PPC shortly after launching some super spendy PowerMacs. The high dudgeon and drama in the forums here, particularly from one unconsolable poster, was truly off the scale and a most entertaining read for those relatively unaffected until the mods felt compelled to wield the ban hammer.
You wouldn't happen to have a link to that or remember the user's forum name would you? I enjoy that sort of entertainment.
 
This is kind of like the conversion to HD digital video in the US. At some point you have to call it and make it happen. If the FCC hadn't set a date and forced broadcasters to turn off analog 4:3 TV signals, we'd still be all over the place, with some HD digital video out there, but probably not a lot, and it would be more expensive. Content standards would be a mess. We would also not have much advancement in broadband wireless, because the frequency spectrum needed to do that would still be occupied by legacy TV broadcasters. The only way to make that broadband spectrum available was to clear the decks of all analog TV broadcasts.

Apple's 64-bit conversion is nowhere near that harsh. If you want to keep running old legacy software, just keep some old legacy machines. The software is already on there. It'll still run. So use it. Don't hold the rest of us back by expecting your niche stuff to be accommodated on new machines in perpetuity.
 
I'm not disagreeing with that. I was just saying that the Linux kernel will probably support x86 for a long time. The ancient Intel i386/80386 finally got dropped in 2012.


Ubuntu is talking about dropping 32bit support, but I would be very surprised if Debian (Ubuntu's parent distribution), did any time soon. Even 64-bit focused distros like RHEL7/CentOS ship 32bit compatibility libs.

Linux and definitely UNIX before it - each new version of the OS usually would mean a recompiling of all the applications that run on it.... on the new platform.

Windows was the first platform that has focused (probably too heavily) at allowing everything to run forever -- but even they deprecate and remove functionality (16 bit apps no longer work). It has a cost -- both in terms of source maintainability and the cost to test - but often individual apps will still have errors on new versions of the OS that don't look expected.

In the larger box all we looked for was our applications to be certified on whatever platform version that it was used on.... and that it would be certified on typically at least two versions at the same time (we did not want to update the platform and the application at the same time - minimizing risk). There was of course one time where the application, the database and the OS were so out of sync that we had to do all pretty much at the same time because of lack of certification on the application part. Although we pressured the application vendor, they would only offer us proper certification -- if we paid for it.... and it would cost an extra $2 million.

I am still amazed that Windows 10 was released with a 32 bit version - a massive kludge for really ancient hardware. Even more amazing when you consider that very few users actually update the operating system on ancient hardware and no new hardware (in a very long time) is uses 32 bit processors. You just have to look at how much effort to it took at the time they ended support for Windows XP to move these companies off of it.... From personal experience (customers of companies I worked for) do not upgrade their OS to newer versions.... without lots of fore-planning and it usually contains a significant budget for replacing the hardware at the same time.... even then there were still many companies that still have not moved off the old hardware with old version of the OS..... It was less of an issue when the internet did not really exist for corporations.
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So does this mean any DVD player other than Apple's won't work after this? Thanks.

No this observation only relates to Apples application "DVD Player", 3rd party DVD Player software would be dependent on the developer.
 
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