10 ms·

macOS Catalina, 64-bit, 32-bit, and related Questions

gfiorav 7y ago
Can someone summarise why we should care about 32 bit sw other than old things that might not be ported?
- rubbingalcohol 7y ago
  > other than old things that might not be ported That's about the only reason to care as far as I can tell. I was pretty surprised to see that relatively recent ports like Bioshock Infinite won't be getting a 64-bit update. We had 64-bit games back in 2005 starting with the original Far Cry, so I'm not sure how this could even be a problem nearly 15 years later.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Even building for 32 bit again can be a lot of trouble, let alone updating every little dependency
  - wincy 7y ago
    Irrational Games, who made Bioshock Infinite’s company went out of business. Who is going to update it?
    - earenndil 7y ago
      Yes but the macos port is by aspyr; do they not have the code anymore?
- rock_artist 7y ago
  If you have no use for 32-bit than you shouldn't care... For modern software or many fields, 32bit isn't critical. However, Some fields still have some 32-bit based products (or frameworks) which would break on Catalina. Why would someone use 32bit? There are closed-sourced products that never released as 64bit. for software developers that's quite rate but still for some fields there are no real alternatives for those products. so they should keep older versions or run VM.
  - simongr3dal 7y ago
    If the hardware, the operating systems, and the software ecosystem around these products kept on supporting 32-bit the products never had any critical incetive to transition. Perhpas now they will have that, or other pieces of software will come and fill the void. I'm still pretty bummed about what this will mean for WINE though, it will mean a lot more work for those devs – or a serious reduction in the amount of software that will work with it.
    - rock_artist 7y ago
      > I'm still pretty bummed about what this will mean for WINE though why? all Intel chips currently supports 32bit ISA. You can still have VMs to run 32bit. also IIRC, Wine is X-Window? so you can even attach through SSH-X to it with simple Docker container.
      - qwerty456127 7y ago
        > Wine is X-Window? so you can even attach through SSH-X to it Absolutely true. I once had to set a client-server Windows-based CRM in a small company. The server had a native Linux version, the client app was windows-only. Client machines ran Windows. Users also wanted to work from home. For some reason (some kind of connection glitches or whatever, I can't remember already) I've chosen to install Xfree on the Ubuntu server (one of command-line-managed VirtualBox VMs on another Ubuntu server actually), set-up the app for direct client-server connection, let users connect to the Linux box over OpenVPN and run the Win32 app with Wine over SSH on their Windows machines :-) I've fell in love with the X as I have managed to set this up (quite easily, BTW). I certainly don't want Linux to loose such a beautiful ability as it switches to Wayland (I don't worry much about Wine though, all the distributions but Ubuntu keep shipping multiarch libs and it works just fine but I won't update my Mac as it has just 128 GiBs SSD and I have no disk space to spare for a Windows VM).
    - bangonkeyboard 7y ago
      This idea that vendors should seek to actively break working software simply because it's "old" is repellent to me. I use several 32-bit apps and components regularly because they continue to function better than the alternatives. Many are unlikely to ever be rewritten or replaced because the developers, ecosystems, and business models that made them possible are today either gone or moribund.
- mikhailt 7y ago
  The other reason I can think of is archival/history, we shouldn't disregard everything we've made in the past just because it doesn't run on latest hardware; they're still a good part of our history that we should learn from. I just wish Apple would include a free downloadable 32-bit image of macOS Mojave or a specific version that we can always run on top of Apple's Hypervisor framework that'll be maintained forever for use of these 32-bit software in the event we don't find a proper 64-bit version and we don't "violate their EULA" if we buy a new Mac that didn't come with Mojave.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    Except Apple already took the same approach with PowerPC applications.
    - mikhailt 7y ago
      IIRC, you could still run these apps on Snow Leopard in VirtualBox by using Rosetta. It's PITA but I would still say they should offer Snow Leopard image for the purpose of having Rosetta support. I'm not saying Apple will do anything like this but it would be nice of them to do it.
      - bdcravens 7y ago
        Maybe a point in time image wouldn't be a bad thing, but what do you mean by "that'll be maintained forever"? That it'll be downloadable, or that Apple should be responsible for security updates, etc, on those legacy OSes?
      - msbarnett 7y ago
        Rosetta relied on a binary recompilation technology they licensed from Transitive. IBM bought it up and changed the licensing such that it was no longer economical for Apple to ship it, which is why it dropped really suddenly. Free copies of Snow Leopard would likely cost them a lot in fees to IBM
  - gumby 7y ago
    I am not going to argue with the legitimate claims of inconvenience (or worse) thanks to deprecating old APIs. But we have a natural experiment of the opposite: Microsoft has bent over backwards to maintain back compatibility. And those old APIs have been the major sources of vulnerabilities, fragility, and maintenance cost. They do occasionally bite the bullet (e.g. old versions of Word are no longer readable) but they go out of their way not to. I really don't like Windows for my own technical reasons but I have tremendous respect for the amount of effort MS has put in over the years on this front and I sympathize with the consequences. Apple has a much smaller "surface" (both vulnerability attack surface as well as surface ear of their own code base) which makes many technical decisions much easier. So either way means a choice; you can't say one is absolutely superior to the other.
- concatime 7y ago
  Games. Seriously. You have a lot of old (even new) games that depend on 32-bit binaries/libraries. And that’s why the recent “clash” between Canonical’s Ubuntu and Valve’s Steam[1]. [1] https://twitter.com/Plagman2/status/1142262103106973698 https://twitter.com/Plagman2/status/1142262103106973698
  - hrktb 7y ago
    can’t old games just be emulated or containerized ?
    - pvg 7y ago
      A lot of these games aren't that old.
      - masklinn 7y ago
        Yup, for instance The Cave can't be run on iOS anymore, because it was developed as a 32b application. It's just one of a thousand.
        olliej 7y ago
        It’s not just “iOS”: the modern (the last few years I think) A-series chips do not have any support for 32bit arm, they are 64bit only.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        saagarjha 7y ago
        Surely only the A11 and above?
        olliej 7y ago
        Honestly I can’t recall which gen dropped it, but presumably the moment they reached their EoL for the last non-64 bit device they had no reason to maintain the development cost of having a 32bit OS, maintaining support for communication between 32 and 64bit apps, nor the cost to users (doubling the size of the resident system memory, confusion of some apps running on some device but not others, etc). And then knowing that if you drop 32bit then you can gain space on your silicon. What irks me is that devs saw the first 64bit devices come out, and didn’t go “I should recompile my code”. Honestly the fact there are so many new apps made for pc that aren’t 64bit is mind blowing to me.
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  That's pretty much it. Its really annoying to have to dual boot Windows so that I can play a game like Civ IV. It's sad that a number of somewhat recent games, as well as games that I want to fire up for nostalgia purposes (e.g. Starcraft) don't work anymore.
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    Having spare time to play Civilization is a luxury (I could only afford this when I was a child, now I only have a humble amount of time left after working, studying, sleeping and working out and I prefer to spend this time with my loved one, outdoors usually). You better just enjoy it and don't waste it on thoughts about annoyances. As for StarCraft you can run it in VirtualBox, or perhaps even DOSBox with Windows95 might be enough. Nevertheless I agree people should care about keeping old games playable - these are an important part of human cultural legacy, a fairly serious form of art, as are paintings, literature, etc.
  - moduspol 7y ago
    They're already working on getting Starcraft to 64 bit [1], but Starcraft is also interesting in that this is the second time this has happened. As a PowerPC application, it also required Rosetta back in the day, and now will need further recompilation for 64-bit only Macs. [1] https://us.battle.net/forums/en/starcraft/topic/20762237268#post-5 https://us.battle.net/forums/en/starcraft/topic/20762237268#...
    - Rebelgecko 7y ago
      True, Blizzard in particular does a fantastic job supporting their older games. It's still a bummer for other games, such as the beloved (by me) Escape Velocity series, whose publisher is now defunct. Its also annoying for people with some commercial software. My dad uses an older nonsubscription version of photoshop and some desktop publishing software that I believe will be incompatible with Catalina
- corey_moncure 7y ago
  Visual Studio
- Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
  Pre-subscription Adobe apps.
vimy 7y ago
A lot, probably the majority, of the games in my steam library are still 32-bit. I wonder how many I'll lose if I upgrade to Catalina.
starman100 7y ago
My Windows 10 machine runs 32-bit apps alongside 64-bit apps just fine. It's no big deal on the Intel architecture. Why is this such a hard thing for Apple to do? (I can also run most 16-bit apps!)
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  For the same reason it is a hard thing for Microsoft to run 16bit apps alongside 64bit apps even though Wine shows that it is perfectly possible for the vast majority of them (those that could run under 16bit protected mode Windows 3.x, which is pretty much all of them): it isn't really a matter of it being hard, it is more a matter of them not wanting to bother (or "allocate the resources to do so" in corporatespeak).
- AlEinstein 7y ago
  MacOS has supported 32-bit apps and 64-bit apps for years. I don’t know why Apple has decided to drop support for 32-bit apps. I still use Photoshop CS6 because I never signed up to the subscription model so if I upgrade to Catalina I won’t have Photoshop anymore (unless I run it in a VM).
  - pier25 7y ago
    There are a lot of people that still use CS6 and decided to not get on board with the subscription model. I'm guessing most will be stuck on Mojave for a couple of years.
  - rangerpolitic 7y ago
    Photoshop CS6 is 64-bit. Source: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/64-bit-os-benefits-limitations.html https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/64-bit-os-benefits-limi...
    - AlEinstein 7y ago
      Unfortunately for people who never switched to the subscription model, the CS6 updates stopped at 13.0.6. You need 13.1 to launch in 64-bit, which is only available to CC subscription holders. Edit: it seems that at one time it was possible for non-CC license holders to upgrade to 13.1 but it doesn't work anymore.
badsectoracula 7y ago
Apple's disregard for backwards compatibility is really the main reason i avoid macOS and iOS nowadays. I've got an iMac back in 2009 and an iPod Touch a year after it came out and with every subsequent update more and more stuff broke to the point where most of the software i had stopped working - including a some software i paid for (while you can say that the fault also lies with the developers, you cannot expect developers to update their software for eternity for free). While Windows software doesn't work 100% of the time, it works often enough to be practically "100%" - unless a program digs deep into the system, chances are it will work either out of the box or with some tinkering. My only fear for the future is that since Microsoft doesn't seem to see Windows as primarily a product to sell to people anymore, they dampen their backwards compatibility efforts. I hope that doesn't happen.
- xoa 7y ago
  With iOS you have a real argument, in that the advantages that come from being able to move the platform along more quickly and deploy resources much more efficiently weigh directly against loss of old software that is no longer maintained (games in particular, a lot of real gems didn't make it from 32-bit). With macOS however, and for that matter Windows or Linux or anything else on the PC, I think it's arguable that the last 10-15 years of improvements and universality of virtualization (and emulation for that matter) have changed the calculus completely. Even with Windows you say >Windows software doesn't work 100% of the time But in my experience it does work 100% of the time... in my Win98 or Win2000 or WinXP VMs which are trivial to spin up at will. And I also have macOS (previous Mac OS X or OS X) VMs going back to 10.6 Server, the first support virtualizable version. macOS is more highly dependent on hardware acceleration, but even there the advent of PCI passthrough means it can be solved at negligible performance penalty. And for OS that are even older, there is now such a delta in raw CPU power that emulation can cover it. So I think the balance has shifted in terms of the value of maintaining BC in a PC OS. It's not useless by any means, nobody wants software breaking every single year. But compared to even 5 years ago I now lean towards it being fine to start leaning more on virtualization beyond the 5-7 year mark, and certainly the 8-10 year mark, whenever there are real benefits to moving forward.
  - 7y ago
xmichael999 7y ago
Can someone explain to me what Apple gains by dropping 32-bit app support?
- scarface74 7y ago
  That’s less of a surface area to support, maintain, or to have to worry about security vulnerabilities.
- whynotminot 7y ago
  Security.
- xenadu02 7y ago
  32-bit macOS uses the older fragile ObjC runtime. Meaning no macOS frameworks present on 32-bit macOS could adopt newer features. In fact they couldn’t even add new ivars because that changes the class layout and would be ABI-breaking. That’s beside the increased disk space and memory used having two copies of everything.
- msbarnett 7y ago
  32 bit code is stuck with the older ObjC runtime, which can’t support a bunch of new language features and suffers from from fragile ABI issues which make changing the internals of classes extremely problematic. It’s not simple to fix (“just upgrade the runtime to support the new features”) because the newer runtime trades on the fact that a bunch of unused space in 64 bit pointers can be exploited for tagging, pointerless classes and a bunch of other things. And if they did fix the fragile ivar problem on the 32bit runtime, you’d need to recompile to use the new way of dynamically calculating strict offsets to member fields — and these apps are mostly dying with 32bit precisely because no one is recompiling them. It’s basically dead-end code that is difficult to maintain and which increasingly requires the rest of the OS to stagnate just to keep it running.
  - mrpippy 7y ago
    Also: the Carbon API set is only supported on 32-bit, and removing 32-bit means all of Carbon can go away. Carbon is a massive API set, with one or sometimes two full legacy APIs (often dating back to the 90s) for everything. Drawing (QuickDraw), multimedia (QuickTime), open/save dialogs (NavServices), fonts/text rendering (Font Manager, ATSUI), windows/menus/dialogs (both HIToolbox and the classic Managers), file I/O, printing, and on and on. Keeping all this stuff functional (to support old apps) while evolving the system underneath is a huge burden which will be lifted from 10.15 on.
lostgame 7y ago
'Doom 3', 'Quake 4', 'Star Wars: Jedi Academy', 'Bioshock: Infinite'...this reads like a list of my favorite MacOS games. I know I won't be upgrading, between this and the way it will kill some of my favorite legacy audio plugins.

Can someone summarise why we should care about 32 bit sw other than old things that might not be ported?

rubbingalcohol 7y ago
> other than old things that might not be ported That's about the only reason to care as far as I can tell. I was pretty surprised to see that relatively recent ports like Bioshock Infinite won't be getting a 64-bit update. We had 64-bit games back in 2005 starting with the original Far Cry, so I'm not sure how this could even be a problem nearly 15 years later.
- jacobush 7y ago
  Even building for 32 bit again can be a lot of trouble, let alone updating every little dependency
- wincy 7y ago
  Irrational Games, who made Bioshock Infinite’s company went out of business. Who is going to update it?
  - earenndil 7y ago
    Yes but the macos port is by aspyr; do they not have the code anymore?
rock_artist 7y ago
If you have no use for 32-bit than you shouldn't care... For modern software or many fields, 32bit isn't critical. However, Some fields still have some 32-bit based products (or frameworks) which would break on Catalina. Why would someone use 32bit? There are closed-sourced products that never released as 64bit. for software developers that's quite rate but still for some fields there are no real alternatives for those products. so they should keep older versions or run VM.
- simongr3dal 7y ago
  If the hardware, the operating systems, and the software ecosystem around these products kept on supporting 32-bit the products never had any critical incetive to transition. Perhpas now they will have that, or other pieces of software will come and fill the void. I'm still pretty bummed about what this will mean for WINE though, it will mean a lot more work for those devs – or a serious reduction in the amount of software that will work with it.
  - rock_artist 7y ago
    > I'm still pretty bummed about what this will mean for WINE though why? all Intel chips currently supports 32bit ISA. You can still have VMs to run 32bit. also IIRC, Wine is X-Window? so you can even attach through SSH-X to it with simple Docker container.
    - qwerty456127 7y ago
      > Wine is X-Window? so you can even attach through SSH-X to it Absolutely true. I once had to set a client-server Windows-based CRM in a small company. The server had a native Linux version, the client app was windows-only. Client machines ran Windows. Users also wanted to work from home. For some reason (some kind of connection glitches or whatever, I can't remember already) I've chosen to install Xfree on the Ubuntu server (one of command-line-managed VirtualBox VMs on another Ubuntu server actually), set-up the app for direct client-server connection, let users connect to the Linux box over OpenVPN and run the Win32 app with Wine over SSH on their Windows machines :-) I've fell in love with the X as I have managed to set this up (quite easily, BTW). I certainly don't want Linux to loose such a beautiful ability as it switches to Wayland (I don't worry much about Wine though, all the distributions but Ubuntu keep shipping multiarch libs and it works just fine but I won't update my Mac as it has just 128 GiBs SSD and I have no disk space to spare for a Windows VM).
  - bangonkeyboard 7y ago
    This idea that vendors should seek to actively break working software simply because it's "old" is repellent to me. I use several 32-bit apps and components regularly because they continue to function better than the alternatives. Many are unlikely to ever be rewritten or replaced because the developers, ecosystems, and business models that made them possible are today either gone or moribund.
mikhailt 7y ago
The other reason I can think of is archival/history, we shouldn't disregard everything we've made in the past just because it doesn't run on latest hardware; they're still a good part of our history that we should learn from. I just wish Apple would include a free downloadable 32-bit image of macOS Mojave or a specific version that we can always run on top of Apple's Hypervisor framework that'll be maintained forever for use of these 32-bit software in the event we don't find a proper 64-bit version and we don't "violate their EULA" if we buy a new Mac that didn't come with Mojave.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  Except Apple already took the same approach with PowerPC applications.
  - mikhailt 7y ago
    IIRC, you could still run these apps on Snow Leopard in VirtualBox by using Rosetta. It's PITA but I would still say they should offer Snow Leopard image for the purpose of having Rosetta support. I'm not saying Apple will do anything like this but it would be nice of them to do it.
    - bdcravens 7y ago
      Maybe a point in time image wouldn't be a bad thing, but what do you mean by "that'll be maintained forever"? That it'll be downloadable, or that Apple should be responsible for security updates, etc, on those legacy OSes?
    - msbarnett 7y ago
      Rosetta relied on a binary recompilation technology they licensed from Transitive. IBM bought it up and changed the licensing such that it was no longer economical for Apple to ship it, which is why it dropped really suddenly. Free copies of Snow Leopard would likely cost them a lot in fees to IBM
- gumby 7y ago
  I am not going to argue with the legitimate claims of inconvenience (or worse) thanks to deprecating old APIs. But we have a natural experiment of the opposite: Microsoft has bent over backwards to maintain back compatibility. And those old APIs have been the major sources of vulnerabilities, fragility, and maintenance cost. They do occasionally bite the bullet (e.g. old versions of Word are no longer readable) but they go out of their way not to. I really don't like Windows for my own technical reasons but I have tremendous respect for the amount of effort MS has put in over the years on this front and I sympathize with the consequences. Apple has a much smaller "surface" (both vulnerability attack surface as well as surface ear of their own code base) which makes many technical decisions much easier. So either way means a choice; you can't say one is absolutely superior to the other.
concatime 7y ago
Games. Seriously. You have a lot of old (even new) games that depend on 32-bit binaries/libraries. And that’s why the recent “clash” between Canonical’s Ubuntu and Valve’s Steam[1]. [1] https://twitter.com/Plagman2/status/1142262103106973698 https://twitter.com/Plagman2/status/1142262103106973698
- hrktb 7y ago
  can’t old games just be emulated or containerized ?
  - pvg 7y ago
    A lot of these games aren't that old.
    - masklinn 7y ago
      Yup, for instance The Cave can't be run on iOS anymore, because it was developed as a 32b application. It's just one of a thousand.
      - olliej 7y ago
        It’s not just “iOS”: the modern (the last few years I think) A-series chips do not have any support for 32bit arm, they are 64bit only.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        saagarjha 7y ago
        Surely only the A11 and above?
        olliej 7y ago
        Honestly I can’t recall which gen dropped it, but presumably the moment they reached their EoL for the last non-64 bit device they had no reason to maintain the development cost of having a 32bit OS, maintaining support for communication between 32 and 64bit apps, nor the cost to users (doubling the size of the resident system memory, confusion of some apps running on some device but not others, etc). And then knowing that if you drop 32bit then you can gain space on your silicon. What irks me is that devs saw the first 64bit devices come out, and didn’t go “I should recompile my code”. Honestly the fact there are so many new apps made for pc that aren’t 64bit is mind blowing to me.
Rebelgecko 7y ago
That's pretty much it. Its really annoying to have to dual boot Windows so that I can play a game like Civ IV. It's sad that a number of somewhat recent games, as well as games that I want to fire up for nostalgia purposes (e.g. Starcraft) don't work anymore.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  Having spare time to play Civilization is a luxury (I could only afford this when I was a child, now I only have a humble amount of time left after working, studying, sleeping and working out and I prefer to spend this time with my loved one, outdoors usually). You better just enjoy it and don't waste it on thoughts about annoyances. As for StarCraft you can run it in VirtualBox, or perhaps even DOSBox with Windows95 might be enough. Nevertheless I agree people should care about keeping old games playable - these are an important part of human cultural legacy, a fairly serious form of art, as are paintings, literature, etc.
- moduspol 7y ago
  They're already working on getting Starcraft to 64 bit [1], but Starcraft is also interesting in that this is the second time this has happened. As a PowerPC application, it also required Rosetta back in the day, and now will need further recompilation for 64-bit only Macs. [1] https://us.battle.net/forums/en/starcraft/topic/20762237268#post-5 https://us.battle.net/forums/en/starcraft/topic/20762237268#...
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    True, Blizzard in particular does a fantastic job supporting their older games. It's still a bummer for other games, such as the beloved (by me) Escape Velocity series, whose publisher is now defunct. Its also annoying for people with some commercial software. My dad uses an older nonsubscription version of photoshop and some desktop publishing software that I believe will be incompatible with Catalina
corey_moncure 7y ago
Visual Studio
Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
Pre-subscription Adobe apps.

vimy 7y ago

A lot, probably the majority, of the games in my steam library are still 32-bit. I wonder how many I'll lose if I upgrade to Catalina.

starman100 7y ago

My Windows 10 machine runs 32-bit apps alongside 64-bit apps just fine. It's no big deal on the Intel architecture. Why is this such a hard thing for Apple to do? (I can also run most 16-bit apps!)

badsectoracula 7y ago
For the same reason it is a hard thing for Microsoft to run 16bit apps alongside 64bit apps even though Wine shows that it is perfectly possible for the vast majority of them (those that could run under 16bit protected mode Windows 3.x, which is pretty much all of them): it isn't really a matter of it being hard, it is more a matter of them not wanting to bother (or "allocate the resources to do so" in corporatespeak).
AlEinstein 7y ago
MacOS has supported 32-bit apps and 64-bit apps for years. I don’t know why Apple has decided to drop support for 32-bit apps. I still use Photoshop CS6 because I never signed up to the subscription model so if I upgrade to Catalina I won’t have Photoshop anymore (unless I run it in a VM).
- pier25 7y ago
  There are a lot of people that still use CS6 and decided to not get on board with the subscription model. I'm guessing most will be stuck on Mojave for a couple of years.
- rangerpolitic 7y ago
  Photoshop CS6 is 64-bit. Source: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/64-bit-os-benefits-limitations.html https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/64-bit-os-benefits-limi...
  - AlEinstein 7y ago
    Unfortunately for people who never switched to the subscription model, the CS6 updates stopped at 13.0.6. You need 13.1 to launch in 64-bit, which is only available to CC subscription holders. Edit: it seems that at one time it was possible for non-CC license holders to upgrade to 13.1 but it doesn't work anymore.

badsectoracula 7y ago

Apple's disregard for backwards compatibility is really the main reason i avoid macOS and iOS nowadays. I've got an iMac back in 2009 and an iPod Touch a year after it came out and with every subsequent update more and more stuff broke to the point where most of the software i had stopped working - including a some software i paid for (while you can say that the fault also lies with the developers, you cannot expect developers to update their software for eternity for free). While Windows software doesn't work 100% of the time, it works often enough to be practically "100%" - unless a program digs deep into the system, chances are it will work either out of the box or with some tinkering. My only fear for the future is that since Microsoft doesn't seem to see Windows as primarily a product to sell to people anymore, they dampen their backwards compatibility efforts. I hope that doesn't happen.

xoa 7y ago
With iOS you have a real argument, in that the advantages that come from being able to move the platform along more quickly and deploy resources much more efficiently weigh directly against loss of old software that is no longer maintained (games in particular, a lot of real gems didn't make it from 32-bit). With macOS however, and for that matter Windows or Linux or anything else on the PC, I think it's arguable that the last 10-15 years of improvements and universality of virtualization (and emulation for that matter) have changed the calculus completely. Even with Windows you say >Windows software doesn't work 100% of the time But in my experience it does work 100% of the time... in my Win98 or Win2000 or WinXP VMs which are trivial to spin up at will. And I also have macOS (previous Mac OS X or OS X) VMs going back to 10.6 Server, the first support virtualizable version. macOS is more highly dependent on hardware acceleration, but even there the advent of PCI passthrough means it can be solved at negligible performance penalty. And for OS that are even older, there is now such a delta in raw CPU power that emulation can cover it. So I think the balance has shifted in terms of the value of maintaining BC in a PC OS. It's not useless by any means, nobody wants software breaking every single year. But compared to even 5 years ago I now lean towards it being fine to start leaning more on virtualization beyond the 5-7 year mark, and certainly the 8-10 year mark, whenever there are real benefits to moving forward.
- 7y ago

xmichael999 7y ago

Can someone explain to me what Apple gains by dropping 32-bit app support?

scarface74 7y ago
That’s less of a surface area to support, maintain, or to have to worry about security vulnerabilities.
whynotminot 7y ago
Security.
xenadu02 7y ago
32-bit macOS uses the older fragile ObjC runtime. Meaning no macOS frameworks present on 32-bit macOS could adopt newer features. In fact they couldn’t even add new ivars because that changes the class layout and would be ABI-breaking. That’s beside the increased disk space and memory used having two copies of everything.
msbarnett 7y ago
32 bit code is stuck with the older ObjC runtime, which can’t support a bunch of new language features and suffers from from fragile ABI issues which make changing the internals of classes extremely problematic. It’s not simple to fix (“just upgrade the runtime to support the new features”) because the newer runtime trades on the fact that a bunch of unused space in 64 bit pointers can be exploited for tagging, pointerless classes and a bunch of other things. And if they did fix the fragile ivar problem on the 32bit runtime, you’d need to recompile to use the new way of dynamically calculating strict offsets to member fields — and these apps are mostly dying with 32bit precisely because no one is recompiling them. It’s basically dead-end code that is difficult to maintain and which increasingly requires the rest of the OS to stagnate just to keep it running.
- mrpippy 7y ago
  Also: the Carbon API set is only supported on 32-bit, and removing 32-bit means all of Carbon can go away. Carbon is a massive API set, with one or sometimes two full legacy APIs (often dating back to the 90s) for everything. Drawing (QuickDraw), multimedia (QuickTime), open/save dialogs (NavServices), fonts/text rendering (Font Manager, ATSUI), windows/menus/dialogs (both HIToolbox and the classic Managers), file I/O, printing, and on and on. Keeping all this stuff functional (to support old apps) while evolving the system underneath is a huge burden which will be lifted from 10.15 on.

lostgame 7y ago

'Doom 3', 'Quake 4', 'Star Wars: Jedi Academy', 'Bioshock: Infinite'...this reads like a list of my favorite MacOS games. I know I won't be upgrading, between this and the way it will kill some of my favorite legacy audio plugins.