Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth • Hacker News Board

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#291

Post by ralphc » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 2:25 PM UTC

greedo wrote: post #71

semiotagonal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

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

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#292

Post by pier25 » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 3:09 PM UTC

least wrote: post #120

pier25 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> steadily-increasing warnings Did they? I only saw warnings in Mojave.

The warnings were for MacOS developers to update their codebase to support 64 bit and transition to newer APIs. Mojave's warnings were for users.

When and how did Apple start communicating those warnings for macOS?

I'm and Apple registered dev. I remember in 2016-2017 when it was announced for iOS and that was just 2-3 years ago. For macOS I think the first time I heard about it was about a year ago.

I would expect such a big deprecation to be announced at least a couple of years in advance if not more, but Apple generally does a terrible job at letting you know what will happen 2+ years down the road.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#293

Post by NohatCoder » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 3:40 PM UTC

goatinaboat wrote: post #242

mihaaly wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my young ages I was hungry for new technology, learning and adapting the progress, experimenting. Nowadays I am for something that works and can be used for what I need. Apple is good in the first, and gives no f* about the second. Their products - including hardware - is for the young. I think I am going to accept that and 'adapt mindset' to this premise as an ultimate step of not 'resisting change'. (I already g…

Their products - including hardware - is for the young. I don’t think that’s it. Once upon a time a Rolex was a serious tool for professional pilots and divers but now it’s a status symbol. It still basically tells the time but no one buys it for that. Once upon a time a Mac...

Difference is, I doubt Rolex could maintain brand status if they stopped making quality watches.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#294

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

jonathanstrange wrote: post #238

deanclatworthy wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why as a creative you should be using a backup solution. With modern internet connections backing up is quick and efficient. File loss should be expected on the FS. Many things can and will go wrong one day.

A big No to that. File loss should be expected due to disk failure, but certainly not "on the file system." That's like saying data loss should be expected in a database. If your FS loses files, get a better FS.

It's not usually the FS itself losing them, but some process getting misled into deleting the wrong directory.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#295

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #205

My father feels the same, he initially started using apple because he felt his Windows machine was using too much of his time for bs. Now he just upgraded to Catalina and Photos stopped working with this Synology based library, even I, a computer nerd, have already spend an hour at the problem. We are about done. I feel that Windows 10 would be just fine for him (or maybe I can get him sold on Ubuntu). Where pictures…

To be fair, Windows also has a Photos app that can suck in photos into a library that's hard to find, and breaks easily .. it's just that nobody uses it.

(The Metro one, not the photo viewer in explorer)

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#296

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 3:48 PM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #284

FireBeyond wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change is absolutely not, "by definition", an improvement. It can be. And it can be entirely the opposite.

What I meant is that an improvement is always a change. It may not have worked for a specific person but it was intended to address an issue for others. Backwards compatibility does not come for free. At some point people refusing to use new features have to be cut off.

Perhaps, but they don't have to like it.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#297

Post by dkonofalski » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:04 PM UTC

allset_ wrote: post #158

dkonofalski wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 sof…

>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.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#298

Post by dkonofalski » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #151

dkonofalski wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ou…

>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.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#299

Post by dkonofalski » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

SrslyJosh wrote: post #201

greedo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

Name one.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#300

Post by dkonofalski » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

pazimzadeh wrote: post #165

dkonofalski wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 y…

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.