It’s that time of year again: the nights are drawing in, the leaves are beginning to drop, we’re wearing long trousers again - and Apple are releasing a slew of new OS upgrades. This week, we saw macOS 10.15 Catalina released.
Despite the marketing slant, this new release is largely an underlying technology update with only a few new user-facing features and, as such, it may seem like a safe upgrade (indeed, compelling, in order to regain sync with Reminders on iOS 13 devices). However, whilst we are generally conservative about approving new OS releases for demand-heavy production systems, we are especially cautious when it comes to Catalina.
One of the main reasons for our reticence is that Catalina completely removes support for 32-bit applications. Like the move from Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (which abandoned support for PowerPC applications), we expect this may catch many users of legacy applications and utilities unawares. Apple have done their best to warn us about dropping support: macOS 10.14 Mojave regularly posts warnings that ’Suchandsuch application is not optimised for your Mac and needs to be updated’ - often even when we’re not attempting to use Suchandsuch.app, haven’t used it for years, and had no intention of launching it today thankyouverymuch.
Whilst the number of 32-bit applications is dwindling, you may well have some seldom-used-but-critical utilities that will completely stop working in Catalina. Additionally some older major applications (which still work splendidly otherwise) will fall by the wayside; a quick rough reckoning has brought the following candidates forward:
Apple iTunes - this was much publicised when Catalina was announced and whilst it is unlikely to be calamitous (iTunes libraries will load into the new Music application), if your workflow heavily leans on iTunes, you might want to sit this out for a while;
Apple iWork ’09 (and older) - current releases of the iWork apps will work fine;
Microsoft Office 2011 (and older) - Office 365 should work as expected;
Filemaker Pro 12 (and older) - current releases of Filemaker should work as expected;
Metric Halo MIO Console (for legacy non-3D interfaces);
With most DAW users now running Logic Pro X or Pro Tools 11+ (both of which only support 64-bit plug-ins), thankfully the complications here are limited. However, an unusually high number of audio software developers have already posted warnings about compatibility concerns with Catalina, which makes us wary of other potential sources of incompatibility, such as the tightening of security practices in the OS, which may wreak havoc as applications, drivers and plug-ins attempt to interplay with each other.
Of course, in the fullness of time, Catalina will likely become the norm - it is almost certain that the new Mac Pro will require Catalina as a minimum, as well as any other new computers that Apple release from hereon. But for now, we’d advise caution, and let others take the hit on their productivity first! So if / when your Mac tells you new updates are available - be very careful about accepting these without checking what they are...
As ever, get in touch if you need more information or assistance.