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Comment by sgt | Hacker News Reader

I'm still running Mojave. Never found the time to upgrade. Ridiculous, I know. Anyone else in the same boat?

I find fewer and fewer new features motivating an upgrade. These days it's integration or fluff like tracking the time you spend on each app. I'm on Catalina and have no incentive to upgrade, but have many incentives not to (e.g. breaking compatibility)

One aspect I find infuriating is UX changes. I like the way things were, change for change's sake is annoying.

I don’t mind visual spruce ups to keep things fresh, but over the last few years at Apple there has been a trend in “hiding things in drawers”. Buttons are removed from UIs and moved to hover actions or put inside overflow menus (which is basically a misnomer at this point as there are not enough buttons to fill a toolbar, let alone overflow one).

It’s awful, because you end up with software that is pretty in a screenshot but is objectively less simple to use, because discoverability drops like a lead balloon.

It seemed to start when Forstall was ousted and Jony Ive’s team took over software design as well as hardware. Their recent laptops have shown you can give up a little form in favour of a lot of function, so hopefully the software teams are (re-)learning the same lessons.

It would be good to just have a choice. The designers can go nuts every year, just give me a drop down and I'll pick the skin I like.

Same. Mojave on one, Catalina on the other. Of course, because these are unsupported Macs, upgrading involves OpenCore and researching what potential quirks will arise with new OS versions. I’m perfectly happy with Mojave, so why upgrade if it means I probably have to get new hardware too?

The main thing that’ll drive me to that is Xcode, which Apple ties to macOS versions, so officially you can’t develop for an OS (macOS, iOS, etc) that is more than a year older than yours. The tricks used to get around that aren’t as reliable as OpenCore.

Even worse: Sierra. Ouch. 10 years ago I used to go for every upgrade immediately (even .0’s). IMO new versions since maybe 10.8 added mostly data collecting bloat. macOS moved far away from the OS I once loved (peaked at Snow Leopard IMO). Funnily, macOS became “free” after Snow Leopard, so you’ve probably paid with your data ever since.

Not data. You pay in service subscriptions and upsold hardware (especially since some features work less well or not at all unless your OSes are upgraded across the board).

I wish I could run Mojave or Catalina on my brand new 16". It came with Monterey, which is ugly. Whoever thought light grey text on dark grey background was a good or reasonable UI choice should be fired.

It's the Windows XP Home of operating systems.

The biggest thing preventing me from upgrading to Big Sur+ is how ugly the UI is. Gone are the elegant, sleek windows of old, replaced by bubbly flat sheets and weird, incongruous menu systems. It feels like Apple was taking the piss out of the GNOME desktop and then forgot to press the "we're just joking" button before they shipped it.

It's possible that the key product people that were responsible for making macOS useful for those other than the iPhone/YouTube generation have mostly moved on from product leadership inside of Apple, whether due to changing priorities, retirement, being sidelined inside of what I am internally mentally referring to as Apple 3.0, or just getting fed up with the tacky panhandler-esque push toward services revenue at all costs, et c.

The GNOME comment is spot on. Unfortunately while the screen and cpu/gpu/apu is amazing in the new M1P/M rMBP16, it is also one of the ugliest laptops Apple has ever shipped. (The best thing they did to the overall design of the iPhone recently, hardware specs aside, was to go back to making the rounded bubble 10/11 be like the 6 in the 12/13, which, despite being an improvement, is a reversion to the past. I also can't tell the difference in the design of the 12 and 13.)

This seriously does not bode well for people who deeply appreciate simple beauty in their daily-use tools.

I was spoiled over the last decade or so of my laptop being of extremely high performance/quality AND ALSO completely unnecessarily fucking gorgeous. Now it's an ugly grey brick. I hope those days aren't over forever.

My a1502 still has Mojave, and I'm not planning on returning to MacOS until they reinstate 32-bit support. It feels like I'm screaming into the void when I tell other people about this, they almost always just shrug their shoulders and say something along the lines of "the Twitter app still works though".

32-bit support is not coming back, and nor should it. Having a mix of apps means having both 32-bit and 64-bit copies of system libraries loaded in memory all the time, which is inefficient.

For security reasons, you probably should partition your Mac, run Catalina or Big Sur* on your main partition with your personal stuff, PGP keys, and other important things, and have a separate partition with Mojave for your legacy apps. If those are mostly games, then you may be better off with a Windows partition instead of Mojave, because that would support even more games.

* A1502 does not get Monterey, I think.

(I'm not the person to whom you were replying)

One of my "important things" is a 32-bit app required for a freelance project. This freelance project also requires some 64-bit apps, so I don't see how two partitions would help here. Am I missing something? (Sincere question -- I'm looking for a new solution because I know Mojave won't be supported forever.)

If that 32-bit app has a Windows version, you could run it on current macOS using CrossOver. Performance might take a hit depending on what you're doing, but the MacBook Pro M1 runs Windows games fairly well in CrossOver. Wine might also work.

If the app only available for 32-bit macOS, I suppose your remaining options are running Mojave in a local VM, or in the cloud (AWS offers Mojave instances for example) for your freelance work.

Out of curiosity, is this an internal enterprise app, or a consumer app? Most consumer apps have alternatives for 64-bit macOS.

> I know Mojave won't be supported forever.

It's unlikely to receive further security updates at this point.

If you're not on the latest macOS, you're not getting all the security updates. You will still get many security updates if you're one version prior (Big Sur right now), and if you're two versions prior you might get a few updates (Catalina). But you're unlikely to get updates to Mojave after this year.

Unfortunately, the app is only available for 32-bit macOS. It's a consumer app, and I have yet to find an equivalent 64-bit alternative.

Thank you for the suggestions :)

Oh, I don't really care about MacOS that much. I've already moved on to Linux, which has much better support for games and legacy software (along with the development I do every day for, y'know, work). I just keep the old lappy on Mojave because it reminds me of better times. I never really do anything beyond basic text editing on it anymore.

Apple is more likely to discontinue support for x64_64 altogether in favor of arm64e than they are to bring back 32bit support. Rosetta v1 didn’t last long when transitioning from PowerPC.

With all due respect. How much time do you think it will take to download and install an update every few years?

I know... not much. And it's the same kind of argument one would use when postponing say, garden work, cleaning the oven, etc. I have taken a vacation day next week to get this done - not just the macOS upgrade of course, but a long list of pending household tasks.

Especially since the update downloads in the background and doesn't require your input after starting it. You can start the update, go do something else, come back and hour later and it's done.

Ahaha yes, and then you're left "only" with a few hours figuring out what broke in your setup because stuff like /usr/local was "liberally" modified by the update. Plus, of course, oops all your 32bit games are ded.

(Yeah sure, not your average Mac user, but still - don't discount the pain that any arbitrary update can and will inflict).

In my experience, updates have been completely painless to the point that at first you hardly notice you updated at all.

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