Getting an old version of Motion

[pizzabox]

Sorry if this is a settled question—some searching didn't turn up much.

I'd like to get Motion, but its current version requires Mojave or later. I'm sitting on Sierra for deliberate reasons. This is not one of those apps where the App Store will serve you up an older, compatible version.

Any surefire workaround? I saw on another forum a suggestion to buy Motion on an eligible Mac, and then install it via Purchases in the App Store on the unsupported Mac. But this seems like an expensive risk if that, in fact, doesn't work, and I didn't see a confirmation that it does.

I'll save my rants about obsolescence and update cycles for another time.

 

[organicCPU]

After buying and downloading the latest Motion 5.4.5 (at time of writing) from a Mac running macOS Mojave, I was able to download Motion 5.4 with another Mac running macOS Sierra from the Mac App Store. Both Macs are using the same Apple ID for the MAS. So yes, I can confirm that it worked what you described.

The same applies to Final Cut Pro (macOS Mojave v. 10.4.8 -> on macOS Sierra v. 10.4), Logic Pro X (macOS Mojave v. 10.5.1 -> macOS Sierra v. 10.4.4), Compressor (macOS Mojave v. 4.4.6 -> macOS Sierra v. 4.4). Main Stage's minimum OS requirement is macOS Sierra for the recent version v. 3.4.4.

It should also work to run macOS Mojave in a VirtualBox on macOS Sierra and buy it on a virtual system.

Another workaround is to use another bootable (external) partition with macOS Mojave on it, to finally get the older version of Motion up and running on the older macOS. For this, if you're excessively cautious, backup your EFI partition to an EFI disk image (efi.binary), before installing macOS Mohave on an internal or external partition as this is probably going to renew the firmware of the Mac. To backup the EFI partition, use this command in Terminal.app and confirm it with your admin credentials:

sudo dd if=/dev/disk0s1 of=efi.binary bs=409600

If you can wait for savings, there might be again a few days in the year, when Apple gives you some (15) percents discount on App Store Gift Cards. Sometimes Apple gave such discounts on Black Friday, sometimes during Christmas time. However, what changes will meanwhile apply to the MAS after the macOS Big Sur release is quite unpredictable. Maybe it's safer to buy Motion earlier without any discount. I hope that Apple doesn't break to serve old app versions as long as you bought the recent release.

 

[pizzabox]

I never thanked you for this reply organic—sorry and thank you.

 

[organicCPU]

You're welcome, no need to worry. Did you already manage to get Motion?