Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina

#131

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 8:59 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #21

pjmlp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently people keep forgetting that laptops and 2-1 hybrids are desktops as well. Microsoft is doing pretty well there, to the point that in many shopping mall shops in Europe, Android tablets have been slowly being replaced by hybrid laptops running Windows 10.

Microsoft Surface sells are estimated to be 20% of Mac sales. https://www.zdnet.com/article/surface-by-the-numbers-how-mic... Apple sells about 20 million Macs a year and even that pales in comparison to mobile sells. The total sales of computers is estimated to be around 63 million last quarter according to Gartner. Compared to 310 million cell phones ( https://www.androidcentral.com/phone-sales-continue-decline-...…

So what? I was speaking about all PC OEMs selling Windows 10 devices, not only Microsoft.

Apple hardware is hardly relevant outside US and a couple of first tier countries.

Mobile phones are good for exactly that, phone calls, Internet and a couple of service apps, hardly for producing content.

Re: Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina

#132

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 9:00 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #55

pjmlp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently people keep forgetting that laptops and 2-1 hybrids are desktops as well. Microsoft is doing pretty well there, to the point that in many shopping mall shops in Europe, Android tablets have been slowly being replaced by hybrid laptops running Windows 10.

The surface line is still very much behind in sales compared to Apple.

There are plenty of other options to buy Windows 10 devices from, including Android vendors like Samsung and Huawei.

Re: Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina

#133

Post by Eric_WVGG » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 9:04 PM UTC

There’s gonna be a whole lot of unhappy Quickbooks users out there. There’s something special about accounting software that makes people reluctant to upgrade, and Intuit certainly hasn’t helped by making the process difficult, confusing and expensive.

Re: Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina

#134

Post by gruturo » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #83

gruturo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that looks like a lot of time, except we're looking at some hard evidence saying it wasn't, after all. Apple helped push forward the state of the art on many things by dropping legacies (No floppy. No CD. No more serial, parallel, scsi, PS/2 ports), but on some it just hurt its own customers with excessive eagerness (USB-C and dongle hell. Headphone jacks, where the ideal timing would have been NEVER. And this v…

What do you mean they failed to account for that? They have a mechanism for signed apps outside of the store that doesn’t cost the developers anything and even that can be bypassed by a simple control click. But for reference. PPC Macs were introduced in 1994 and 68K emulation was dropped in 2006 with the introduction of x86 based Macs. OS X was introduced in 2001 and OS 9 support was dropped in 2006. PPC support was…

By "Failed to account for that" I mean that they failed to consider how much software has been produced outside their control, so they should have been more considerate with the timeline for dropping compatibility. And there's plenty, plenty more stuff outside these 235 apps - sometimes new versions are expensive and do nothing new or useful for most users.

Here we are talking about dropping application that the CPU is still fully capable of running. There's no silicon advantage like on the latest iPhones. There's no big performance penalty running an emulated app, which would quickly drive people to use something native. There's no Moore's law obsoleting your current platform nearly as quickly as it once happened.

Apple has, in the past, treated people better when changing architecture that it just did with this thing, where the architecture stayed the same.

Edit: To the long list of past architectures Apple has dropped, maybe the root of the problem would be that I (mistakenly, maybe) do not consider 32-bit as past. I consider it still somewhat current, so seeing it dropped like this is less acceptable.

Re: Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina

#135

Post by reggintoggaf » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 9:06 PM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #84

cousin_it wrote: post #50

Funny thing about games: most revenue happens soon after release. It's like movies. A game from several years ago usually has low ongoing revenue, so there's little profit in updating it for a new OS. Many Mac games will just die. Especially indies, where the creator might have already moved on. Do you own any nice but not very successful Mac games? They'll die. This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game plat…

This is also why all programs should be distributed with source code. If not, you are at the mercy of the platform not to break what you have bought.

Not workable. But the source should be placed in escrow that releases it once the program is no longer supported.

Re: Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina

#136

Post by ratww » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

cousin_it wrote: post #50

Funny thing about games: most revenue happens soon after release. It's like movies. A game from several years ago usually has low ongoing revenue, so there's little profit in updating it for a new OS. Many Mac games will just die. Especially indies, where the creator might have already moved on. Do you own any nice but not very successful Mac games? They'll die. This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game plat…

> This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform, compared to Windows which can run decades old games fine.

But this has happened before. Pretty much every pre-2007 Mac game stopped working in 2012 after they removed Rosetta, their PPC emulator.

And 64-bit Intel has been available since Leopard, released in 2007. So that leaves a tiny window of 32-bit only releases.

On the other hand, the removal of OpenGL, if/when that ever happens, might have worse consequences.

Re: Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina

#137

Post by scarface74 » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

turndown wrote: post #125

scarface74 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By definition, the less code you have to maintain the less surface area for vulnerabilities. It is looking more and more like Apple cannot produce products other people can, not the other way around. Most of their recent product announcements(2017 and after, especially) have begun to look quite disappointing in my eyes. If that were true, you would see Apple’s products trending downward when other competitors are tre…

>By definition, the less code you have to maintain the less surface area for vulnerabilities. It does not sound like you have any legitimate information about how Windows compatability increases vulnerabilites beyond vague statements. Trust me when I say that no one here thinks Windows is terribly secure, just that Mac OS X isn't secure at all either, and doesn't provide backwards compatability on top. >If that were…

Samsung and every other vendor outside of China have announced lower sales as people keep their phones longer.

While everyone admits that Mac keyboards are horrible, Mac sales are so small compared to everything else Apple sells, it doesn’t really hurt their bottom line

both of my roommates who have iPhone Xs are thinking about switching to Android after being plagued with constant hardware and software issues.

Anecdote is not data.

It does not sound like you have any legitimate information about how Windows compatability increases vulnerabilites beyond vague statements.

Let me tell you a little story about how the half dozen different ways to represent and encode a string in Windows led to a security issue in IIS where you could just encode a DOS command in a browser window and have it execute remotely....

https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/threats/paper/...

Or a DCOM vulnerability in 2019. No one uses DCOM anymore.

https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2003-0352/

Re: Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina

#138

Post by scarface74 » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 9:16 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #131

scarface74 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Surface sells are estimated to be 20% of Mac sales. https://www.zdnet.com/article/surface-by-the-numbers-how-mic... Apple sells about 20 million Macs a year and even that pales in comparison to mobile sells. The total sales of computers is estimated to be around 63 million last quarter according to Gartner. Compared to 310 million cell phones ( https://www.androidcentral.com/phone-sales-continue-decline-...…

So what? I was speaking about all PC OEMs selling Windows 10 devices, not only Microsoft. Apple hardware is hardly relevant outside US and a couple of first tier countries. Mobile phones are good for exactly that, phone calls, Internet and a couple of service apps, hardly for producing content.

So what? I was speaking about all PC OEMs selling Windows 10 devices, not only Microsoft.

I also posted estimates where computer sells are a fifth of mobile sells.

Apple hardware is hardly relevant outside US and a couple of first tier countries.

And neither are PC sales. Most people’s only computer is a phone and most of the money coming from those people are on mobile.

Mobile phones are good for exactly that, phone calls, Internet and a couple of service apps, hardly for producing content.

And unless you’re Microsoft or Adobe, you’re not making money selling PC software to produce content. Companies making money on software are either doing it indirectly through services or by producing applications/services running on the web or mobile.

Re: Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina

#139

Post by scarface74 » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #132

coldtea wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The surface line is still very much behind in sales compared to Apple.

There are plenty of other options to buy Windows 10 devices from, including Android vendors like Samsung and Huawei.

And all together they sell less than a fifth of the number of mobile devices being sold. There is a reason that MS is running away from Windows and that they put .Net Framework in permanent maintenance mode. They don’t even want to spend money supporting their own browser engine.

Re: Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina

#140

Post by scarface74 » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

gruturo wrote: post #134

scarface74 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean they failed to account for that? They have a mechanism for signed apps outside of the store that doesn’t cost the developers anything and even that can be bypassed by a simple control click. But for reference. PPC Macs were introduced in 1994 and 68K emulation was dropped in 2006 with the introduction of x86 based Macs. OS X was introduced in 2001 and OS 9 support was dropped in 2006. PPC support was…

By "Failed to account for that" I mean that they failed to consider how much software has been produced outside their control, so they should have been more considerate with the timeline for dropping compatibility. And there's plenty, plenty more stuff outside these 235 apps - sometimes new versions are expensive and do nothing new or useful for most users. Here we are talking about dropping application that the CPU…

How is 32 bit “current”? Intel introduced its first 64 bit chip in 2004. By 2009, the Core 2 Duo was mainstream.

Apple hasn’t sold a 32 bit computer in a decade.