Quote:
Originally Posted by OtinG
I'm going to have to start weighing the plus and minus arguments for upgrading to Catalina on my MacBook Pro 15" Retina mid-2014 running Mojave.
A big minus is the lack of support for 32 bit apps, and I still have nearly 100 apps listed as 32 bit. Many of those are old apps I don't use and can simply delete. Many others are Adobe apps, and hopefully Adobe will update them to 64 bit. I think most of the 32 bit Adobe apps are no longer necessary though as they were probably for the pre-Adobe Cloud apps. But I still have a significant number of 32 bit apps that I need and want, including MS Office 2011 and the apps that I use with my security cameras. At any rate, any of the 32 bit apps I deem keepable can be transferred to my Mac Mini which will stay at High Sierra.
I prefer to have MS Office 2011 on my main computer, the MBP, but it won't survive a Catalina update. I already installed OpenOffice so I could switch to that, but I've been using MS Office for ever and am familiar with it. I hate Numbers with a passion.
My Mac Mini 2012 is still running High Sierra and I have no desire to upgrade it at all. It is already is slow enough, so I don't want to slow it more with Catalina. Plus it runs Bootcamp with Windows 10 as the dual boot OS, and I really don't want to mess that up and have to redo its setup. And of course I need a Mac on which to run my "must keep" 32 bit apps.
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I think that Apple announced that 32 bit apps would be phased out several years ago. The current version warns that the app is not optimized for the mac if it's 32 bit. I would suggest that any company that hasn't updated their apps to 64 bit by now might not be actively working on that app. Heck, even Bare Bones updated Yojimbo to 64 bit.
With that said, if older apps are important, then don't upgrade. I keep my mac mini at Sierra for just that reason since several apps that I use stopped working with High Sierra.
One of the big reasons that Microsoft had so many problems with various releases of Windows is that they wanted to maintain support for old versions of software, many of which depended on "undocumented features" of the operating system. Maintaining backward compatibility can be a huge drag on moving forward. Apple has always been aggressive about forcing developers to only use the documented API and has been very upfront about backwards compatibility not being a major design criteria.
From a personal point of view, when I notice that an app hasn't been updated in a while and no longer seems to be under active development, I like to start looking for a replacement for it. That's not always possible, especially if you have hardware support requirements (I have a weather station hooked up as well as a USB scanner) but I've found it to be a good rule of thumb. At the moment, on my main computer, I don't have any 32 bit apps left that I actively use.