Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
It's _always_ easier to simply drop support for legacy. And can often result in real savings in other ways, such as security and hardware. Apple, being a closed system, has no real compelling reason to want to provide legacy support -- they want you to buy new.
Microsoft faced this when they moved to 64-bit Windows. They dropped support for 16-bit apps, but supported 32-bit apps (and, in fact, continue to ship 32-bit versions of the consumer version of Windows to this day.)
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There are two basic models for supporting legacy. One is to only support legacy for a limited time, which simplifies security and maintenance and makes it much easier to move in new directions, the other is to attempt to provide backward compatibility as much as possible, which makes it much more complex to move forward.
Microsoft and Windows is the classic example of the later and a big reason that many versions of Windows were so buggy. Many people get comfortable with something and resist change as much as possible. I know people who were still using DOS programs well over a decade after Windows 3.0 came out.
The big issue with operating systems is that to move forward, you have to change things including the internal API's. This causes programs not to work. The real issue with 32 bit programs and Apple isn't that they are 32 bit, it's that they haven't been upgraded. Apple moved to 64 bit almost a decade ago and has been telling app programs for well over a year that they were dropping 32 bit support. So if you have a program that isn't 64 bit, odds are pretty good it hasn't been upgraded in a while.
The real answer if you have some 32 bit program that hasn't been upgraded is not to upgrade the operating system. Of course that means that you won't get security updates and eventually certain programs that connect to backend systems such as iTunes will stop being able to connect to those backend systems. I have an old 32 bit mac mini that I keep at Sierra. I use it to run a couple of old legacy programs that broke when High Sierra came out.