Apple is not looking at 6 year old applications and saying “It’s been long enough, time to drop support for this app”. They are looking at the 30+ year old architecture that is 32-bit x86.
Look, everyone knows how Apple rolls when it comes to operating systems--they kill old APIs, frameworks, and even entire classes of apps on a pretty regular basis.
No mainstream operating system that ran on 68000 processors in the 80's, PowerPC in the 90's and Intel since 2006 is even around today.
Y’all must have forgot how NeXTStep, which later became Mac OS X and now macOS ran on 68000, Sparc and MIPS back in the day.
The same way Apple was running Mac OS X on Intel hardware long before the first Intel Macs were released, there's got to be Arm-based MacBooks or Mac minis running macOS right now.
So it makes sense for Apple to get rid of as much technical debt as they can before making that jump.
And because of Catalyst, which enables iPad apps to be ported to macOS, there will be more apps for the Mac.
> Look, everyone knows how Apple rolls when it comes to operating systems--they kill old APIs, frameworks, and even entire classes of apps on a pretty regular basis.
Every platform has to balance the developer experience with the user experience. Microsoft, with their incredible backwards compatibility support, has one approach, whereas Apple has a very different one.
That’s a rather simplistic view of things. The long and the short of it is this; it’s not Apple’s responsibility to to ensure Adobe’s software runs on their platform, it’s Adobe’s and Adobe no longer support CS6.
What is a computer if not a place for software to run on? Is it not part of the producer's responsibility to make sure software runs fine on their platform? The bond goes both ways.
It’s more the 20-year old Carbon API set (parts of which are 30+ years old like QuickDraw) than x86 itself. Apple doesn’t get to drop x86 support from Intel’s silicon (like they did with 32-bit ARM on iOS).
