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I don't game on Mac, but I did develop for MacOS for a number of years. Who was releasing 32 bit binaries on MacOS in the last 10 years? Snow Leopard was the la

I don't game on Mac, but I did develop for MacOS for a number of years. Who was releasing 32 bit binaries on MacOS in the last 10 years? Snow Leopard was the last major version to support 32 it, it's been deprecated since 2009!

jseliger 7y ago
Adobe. Lightroom 6 is the last standalone version that doesn't require subscriptions. It won't run on Catalina and has no good substitute on MacOS (I know about http://darktable.org/ http://darktable.org/ but it is not performant or Mac-like on MacOS).
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Once upon a time, I would have suggested Aperture as a Lightroom substitute, but funny thing about that...
- 9935c101ab17a66 7y ago
  There are a litany of lightroom competitors on macOS ATM: CaptureOne and Irridient Developer are probably my favourites, but there's also Luminar and a few I'm forgetting.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Game companies! The majority of the Mac compatible games I have are 32 bit. Also, Snow Leopard may have been the last version to support 32 bit processors, but I don't think support for 32 bit apps was deprecated that long ago? Certainly, Apple themselves was still releasing 32bit software back then—if you have a copy of iWork '09 (which got updated as late as 2012), it's 32 bit.
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  Not to be a jerk but... why? At a certain point none of your customers are running 32 bit hardware, so which parts of your toolchain/dependency tree are so ancient or difficult to alter that you remain compiling to 32 bit? And while you're right it was deprecated immediately, I do recall universal binaries were soft and then hard deprecated some years ago but I could tell you the exact date. I know there's a lot of vintage software that would never be updated, but like, a good chunk of stuff seems to have been new development or continued support.
  - Jasper_ 7y ago
    Because no serious game developer expects a platform vendor to pull the rug out from under them. What benefit is there to an up-to-date port, especially when very few people already buy games on Mac? Most of these port projects were done 10 years ago, when Steam on Mac first released.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Except that has happened multiple times across the industry's history, specially on the consoles, it is a know business factor to take into account.
      - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
        Console generations are a known quantity for both developers and consumers. A lot of people keep their old consoles around when they buy a new one. You will never see Sony release a PS4 update that drops support for 2013-era PS4 games, at least not purposefully. If they did, people would be very mad.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Game consoles come and go, e.g. Saturn, Jaguar. I did saw Sony drop the almost unused GL ES support on the PS 2.
      - Jasper_ 7y ago
        Sure, but you're missing that it's worth the effort to maintain. Console platform sales are extremely healthy. Mac sales have never really been enough to support initial porting work, let alone continued investment.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    I'm not a game developer, so I can't really answer your question. But it's worth noting that most of these games are 32 bit on Windows too. I don't know if that's because of middleware or an actual desire to support 32 bit hardware, but regardless, it probably doesn't make sense to use 32 bit on Windows and 64 bit on macOS. For non-games, a lot of the Mac software that was still 32 bit was using Carbon, which doesn't have a 64 bit variant. Carbon is old as heck, but if you're using it, there's no upgrade path other than a complete rewrite. That may or may not be worthwhile versus EOL'ing the software. (As a complete tangent, I recently learned that Apple did once promise a 64 bit version of Carbon. The library was present in the developer preview of Leopard, and many devs began building with it. But then it was gone in Leopard's final release, and Apple never mentioned it again.)

jseliger 7y ago

Adobe. Lightroom 6 is the last standalone version that doesn't require subscriptions. It won't run on Catalina and has no good substitute on MacOS (I know about http://darktable.org/ http://darktable.org/ but it is not performant or Mac-like on MacOS).

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Once upon a time, I would have suggested Aperture as a Lightroom substitute, but funny thing about that...
9935c101ab17a66 7y ago
There are a litany of lightroom competitors on macOS ATM: CaptureOne and Irridient Developer are probably my favourites, but there's also Luminar and a few I'm forgetting.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

Game companies! The majority of the Mac compatible games I have are 32 bit. Also, Snow Leopard may have been the last version to support 32 bit processors, but I don't think support for 32 bit apps was deprecated that long ago? Certainly, Apple themselves was still releasing 32bit software back then—if you have a copy of iWork '09 (which got updated as late as 2012), it's 32 bit.

unlinked_dll 7y ago
Not to be a jerk but... why? At a certain point none of your customers are running 32 bit hardware, so which parts of your toolchain/dependency tree are so ancient or difficult to alter that you remain compiling to 32 bit? And while you're right it was deprecated immediately, I do recall universal binaries were soft and then hard deprecated some years ago but I could tell you the exact date. I know there's a lot of vintage software that would never be updated, but like, a good chunk of stuff seems to have been new development or continued support.
- Jasper_ 7y ago
  Because no serious game developer expects a platform vendor to pull the rug out from under them. What benefit is there to an up-to-date port, especially when very few people already buy games on Mac? Most of these port projects were done 10 years ago, when Steam on Mac first released.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Except that has happened multiple times across the industry's history, specially on the consoles, it is a know business factor to take into account.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Console generations are a known quantity for both developers and consumers. A lot of people keep their old consoles around when they buy a new one. You will never see Sony release a PS4 update that drops support for 2013-era PS4 games, at least not purposefully. If they did, people would be very mad.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Game consoles come and go, e.g. Saturn, Jaguar. I did saw Sony drop the almost unused GL ES support on the PS 2.
    - Jasper_ 7y ago
      Sure, but you're missing that it's worth the effort to maintain. Console platform sales are extremely healthy. Mac sales have never really been enough to support initial porting work, let alone continued investment.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  I'm not a game developer, so I can't really answer your question. But it's worth noting that most of these games are 32 bit on Windows too. I don't know if that's because of middleware or an actual desire to support 32 bit hardware, but regardless, it probably doesn't make sense to use 32 bit on Windows and 64 bit on macOS. For non-games, a lot of the Mac software that was still 32 bit was using Carbon, which doesn't have a 64 bit variant. Carbon is old as heck, but if you're using it, there's no upgrade path other than a complete rewrite. That may or may not be worthwhile versus EOL'ing the software. (As a complete tangent, I recently learned that Apple did once promise a 64 bit version of Carbon. The library was present in the developer preview of Leopard, and many devs began building with it. But then it was gone in Leopard's final release, and Apple never mentioned it again.)