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> That reads less like a reasonable, well-thought breakdown and more like a whiny diatribe coming from an entitled teenager.

A customer is legitimately entitled to upgrades that aren't actually downgrades.

> Apple isn't forcing anyone to upgrade at all.

> Just don't act surprised and attacked when it doesn't work anymore years from now.

Well... if Apple isn't forcing people to upgrade now, but will later, then there's still grounds for complaint.

An unhappy customer always has the right, nay, duty, to publicly complain until the business changes its behavior.

>legitimately entitled

No, they are not. This isn't an upgrade to their existing OS like a patch release. This is a new OS completely and developers were all warned years in advance that Catalina would drop 32-bit support. This is not a downgrade in the slightest.

>but will later

I have a Mac Mini from 2005 that still runs MacOS Leopard just as well as the day I bought it. I can't install all the latest, greatest software on it and I can't even access every website anymore (TLS updates and all that) but it still functions as good, if not better, than it did when I first bought it and runs all the software that's still installed on it.

No MacOS update has ever been forced or mandatory. Ever.

The customer is not always right but I'm pretty sure offering an OS upgrade is doing right by the customer considering it doesn't cost anything and, for most people, adds far more than it takes away and is, again, optional.

There's a lot of space in between "Company X has wronged me" and "I'm happy with company X". I feel very let down by Apple right now, and I sense the author does too. As the saying goes: I'm not angry, just disappointed.

The fact that macOS updates are optional, and you can downgrade at any time, really does help a great deal here. However, Apple's three years of security updates per release isn't much.

>I feel very let down by Apple right now

And that is totally fine for you to feel that way. You are not, however, entitled to some kind of reparation for that and, if you wrote a diatribe that was comparable to the OP, I would also say that you're making a mountain out of a molehill.

Something being disappointing to you, individually, does not make it a massive failure for everyone.

> You are not, however, entitled to some kind of reparation for that

Did you get the sense the author feels "entitled to some kind of reparation"? That's not a sentiment I came away with at all.

>This is a new OS completely

I don't disagree with your point as a whole, but Catalina is is not a new OS, it's an incremental upgrade.

It's a new OS in the scope that it's dropping 64-bit support completely from all Mac hardware. It will not function the same way that the old macOS versions did and large parts of it are fundamentally different from prior versions.

No computer that is not getting security hotfixes is "just as good" as it was when it was getting those updates.

Yes it is. Those updates have been applied to it. It does not magically get worse simply because time passes. It does literally everything it did when I bought it and then some because new software came out after it was purchased. Just because it can't run everything else that's come out since then doesn't magically make it stop doing what it's already been able to do.

> It does literally everything it did when I bought it and then some because new software came out after it was purchased.

It quite literally does not.

In 2008, I would have felt comfortable running a Snow Leopard machine with Web Sharing enabled accessible over WAN. Then I could throw whatever I wanted into the ~/Sites folder and access it anywhere.

In 2018 I wouldn't dare do this because Snow Leopard's apache is outdated and vulnerable.

>It quite literally does not.

It quite literally does. I don't have Web Sharing enabled because the machine isn't hooked up to the network or internet at all.

This computer can still do everything it did when I bought it. Even with an outdated Apache server, I can still run the same sites on it now that I did back when I bought it, even if that's not recommended because it may have vulnerabilities.

You are wrong.

A customer isn't entitled to any upgrades. Apple used to charge for upgrades in the past. Now they give them away for free. Apple has never forced anyone on to upgrade their Macs. I have a fourteen year old Mac Pro that still works fine. Sure it can't run Catalina, but I don't need it to.

And complaining? Complaining about what? You act as if Apple is bricking computers if you don't upgrade...

> Apple used to charge for upgrades in the past. Now they give them away for free.

But back then, they also supported old releases for longer.

I actually suspect this was part of Apple's internal calculus, or part of it. "Free upgrades will get installed by more people, so we can drop old releases more quickly." A fine tradeoff under some circumstances, but right now, the old way of things is looking quite appealing.

>But back then, they also supported old releases for longer.

I don't think that's true. I've been an Apple user since just before OS X's release and the support level was always 2 versions back since like Panther.

Yeah, but since OS's didn't come out annually, that effectively meant a significantly longer support cycle.

You could argue "well, what changed isn't price, but release cadence," but they all go hand in hand. If upgrades were paid, the release cadence would probably have to be slower.

I still get patches from Apple for my older Macs that are classified as obsolete. Mostly stuff like Safari etc.

You do?! What OS, and how recently?

I know Mavericks hasn't gotten anything since 2016...

_Apple_ never has, but I had to upgrade macOS a couple of years ago because Chrome stopped supporting older versions.

No, they're just bricking apps if you do upgrade.

Name one.

Catalina does break a lot of games. I am pretty sure that if you get on Steam, the list of games that Catalina breaks is longer than the list of games that work on Catalina.

I'm sure it does because most games didn't update to 64-bit. I still fail to see how that warrants an article like that. If you know the games won't work and you still want to play them, don't upgrade. It's not that hard.

As it happens, the author isn't upgrading.

And your point is? I've already acknowledged that. I'm pointing out that a disappointment for their individual situation doesn't indicate that the update is a failure nor does it warrant what they've written.

It is a problem for them, and they express it. What do you think is wrong with that? Not being able to run 32-bit applications is a deal-breaker for many people. The update is a failure for them for this or many other reasons. It might not affect you, and that is fine, but it does affect other people and it is a perfectly valid concern that they could voice. Why are you so against them voicing their problems with the update? Who are you to be the judge of what warrants and does not warrant any articles? Ultimately your opinion on whether it warrants an article or a comment does not matter, thank goodness. What if I told you that you being fine with the update does not warrant a comment? Whatever your answer is, please repeat the same thing to yourself because it seems like you have a strong dislike towards the act of voicing valid issues with the update. I would dare to say it reeks of fanpersonism.

>it does affect other people and it is a perfectly valid concern

It most certainly does not affect them if they don't choose to update. That's exactly my issue with this whole thread. You're all straw-manning my response as if my complaint is with the person's desire to write an article about their opinion. That's not my issue. My issue is with the fact that their complaint doesn't line up with the statements they've made in the article and the fact that they're treating an optional update as some kind of requirement that points to a fault in the OS.

And, frankly, I think your statement about reeking of "fanpersonism" is unfair considering that the only time the site in question has ever posted to HN is to complain about Apple and/or their products. That, to me, is fanpersonism.

> It most certainly does not affect them if they don't choose to update.

This has been addressed in other comments by others and I.

> And, frankly, I think your statement about reeking of "fanpersonism" is unfair

I based it on the things you have said about what warrants or does not warrant an article. In any case: no hard feelings.

> the only time the site in question has ever posted to HN is to complain about Apple and/or their products.

Huh?

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=morrick.me

What's your point? For someone who's entire argument is just to accuse people of being whiny and entitled, you're being particularly whiny and entitled when it comes to other people having different opinions than you.

Where am I being whiny and entitled in any of my responses? I have no issue at all with people having different opinions. My issue is when their complaints don't line up with what they're saying. Namely, that their choice in preference is a failure with Catalina rather than simply something that doesn't fit their need. That distinction doesn't make Catalina a failure or controversial.

Is that just because of the signing requirement on executables?

No, it's because for some reason there's a bunch of 32-bit only games on macOS.

> Technology changes. That's a fact of life.

Is it? It's not really clear to me there's any sort of hard technical limit that requires operating systems to abandon components that support older software.

There may be an economic argument that every team has a limited amount of attention and resources, and older libraries/apis/layers may compete with newer ones, and that argument may even have some merit if the newer stuff is categorically better.

But, OTOH, there's MS's backward's compatibility, so it's clear that some platform owners can bear the cost just fine. Too bad Apple just doesn't make enough money for that, I suppose. :/

Perhaps they could think differently and charge users who want to stay on older versions of macOS for the updates. That'd provide a signal of how valuable it actually is and perhaps even a supporting revenue stream.

Unless resources aren't actually the issue.

The point is it's always slightly risky to upgrade, and if there aren't life-changing new features this time around (which there aren't) then in the short term you're simply rolling the dice and simultaneously losing compatibility with all 32-bit apps. It's for these reasons that for the first time in years, I'm not immediately updating.

That's fine, though. There's nothing that says that you can't stay on the version of the OS that you're using until you decide not to.

That decision, though, comes with the consequence that you likely won't be able to run new software. If you're not worried about new software and don't want to be until the point comes where you need new software, the updates have always been optional.

Sure, as long as they keep fixing bugs and issuing security updates for the older OS's. But Apple Support articles start with "Update to the latest version of macOS and try again"

There is also no particular reason that I can tell why certain features are only added to the latest OS, though we have become desensitized to this. For example - why can't the ability to extend the Mac desktop to the iPad be added to Mojave?

>why can't the ability to extend the Mac desktop to the iPad be added to Mojave

Likely because there's a part of the iCloud stack that was set up by code that's not in Mojave. Additionally, that was never advertised as a feature of Mojave so I fail to see why there would be any expectation that this would be added to Mojave.

> Likely because there's a part of the iCloud stack that was set up by code that's not in Mojave

That's my point - if it's a software requirement then it can in theory be added to say Mojave 10.14.7.

> that was never advertised as a feature of Mojave so I fail to see why there would be any expectation that this would be added to Mojave

This is software, so I highly doubt that the real reason is technical (why can't the code be added to Mojave?) just that Apple feels they may suffer long term if they reward people for not updating to major releases, or it's too costly to maintain so many forks of macOS.

I wouldn't care nearly as much if Catalina didn't drop support for 32-bit apps.

What was wrong with being able to run both old and new software? I thought that was a perfectly fine middle ground, and now the customer MUST decide between old vs new. Does not sound good to me, at all. I would pick Linux instead. :)

>What was wrong with being able to run both old and new software?

There's wasn't much wrong with being able to run it but there's a hell of a lot of technical debt that comes with being able to support and maintain it. Every binary that needed to run on 32 and 64 bit OSs had double the code in it, double the dependencies, and literally double of everything. Developers were all notified about the change more than 3 years ago and 2 OS versions ago. This was not a surprise.

>I would pick Linux instead.

And you have that option. Godspeed.

Not really. 32-bit apps run on Mojave and below without needing 64-bit code. Unless an app needs to address more than 4 GB of RAM, there's no great need to make it 64-bit. On the other hand, going from 32 to 64 bit requires work up front.

You're missing the point. The OS moved to 64-bit because that's where it has to go from here. While 32-bit "still works" right now, it will eventually not be enough. The work to make the move to 64-bit already happened so keeping both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries takes up additional space, additional upkeep, and separate development paths.

I agree with the "entitled teenager" feel of the article. The author sees a change in Mail's look and a change font.

A software developer sees Apple finally busting up iTunes which was an overloaded monolithic beast. A software developer sees Apple dropping 32-bit to reduce complexity. This is all refactoring which we'd love to do on our own projects.

I think you just came here to tell OP that he's wrong for having different priorities than you do.

It's not a matter of different priorities. It's a matter of accurate vs. inaccurate.

And, for someone complaining about that, you sure didn't do much more than come here and tell me that I'm wrong for having different priorities without any of the follow-through that I did to, at the very least, explain my thoughts. You haven't even done that.

He also hasn't installed Mojave. Was that not worth the trouble, either?

It's a pretty typical graybeard rant about the halcyon days. Except since we're in 2019, replace System 7 with Snow Leopard.