Away With All 32-Bit Mac Software

There is a totalitarian frame of mind that favors what I would call routinely hyperbolic language.  Some years ago, I read a book that was published during the Great Cultural Revolution in the Peoples' Republic of China from 1966 to 1976.  It described the work of an English doctor who had defected to China and cooperated fully with the regime's propaganda machine.  The actual good he did medically, which was considerable, is not the point.  But the title of the book was classic totalitarian-speak:  Away With All Pests. 

Apple is not the PRC, but their attitude toward individuals and smaller companies in their orbit of influence is, shall we say, hardly cooperative and democratic in all cases.  Take, for example, the situation of a small or medium-size software developer, for whom a total rewrite of their software product is a crippling and possibly prohibitive undertaking.  Now, I'm not a computer scientist, and so some of what I say may be speculative or even wrong.  But from what I can tell, taking an application written for a 32-bit operating system (which was the typical PC and Mac system until about 2004, when Intel introduced their 64-bit processor), and rewriting it for a 64-bit OS is a big deal, and presents all sorts of backward-compatibility and other issues that may be insurmountable in some cases.  So it's understandable that many software firms simply haven't bothered yet.

Well, along comes Apple last June and announces that the next OS upgrade—OS 10.14, called Mojave—will be the last version to support 32-bit software at all.  High Sierra—the one my fairly new Mac runs—will tolerate 32-bit stuff, but it's the last one that will do so without problems.  So what that means is, if I have to upgrade my OS beyond what I have now, I risk losing, and am eventually certain to lose, all my 32-bit software.

Up until 2016, that included near-vital things like Microsoft Office.  Microsoft finally got in gear and issued 64-bit versions of Office for Mac, but those of you clinging to the old friendly version of Excel that I used to like so much are going to be out of luck when 32-bit becomes anathema. 

Personally, I stand to lose three different apps that are specialized enough that the supporting companies are fairly small, or in one case is just open-source freeware hosted by a government agency.  I have no idea whether these organizations are going to offer 64-bit versions in time for me to keep using them when the dark day comes that I kiss High Sierra good-by and grit my teeth and get the new 64-bit-only OS.  But if experience is any guide, I'll lose some valuable software, and the ability to work with its legacy files, in the process.  The last time this happened I lost an expensive video editing application and all its video files—toast, after only three or four years.

Of course, if I had the attitude prescribed by our fearless Apple corporate leaders, I would not harbor such traitorous thoughts as the notion that Apple can do anything wrong, and think that the latest OS upgrade is anything other than an unalloyed boon to humanity.  And I would regard the 32-bit software vendors as running dogs of imperialism, or whatever the latest totalitarian insult is. 

But I have a life outside of the time I spend on my computer, and in that life I try to relate to things of permanence and eternal significance:  God, for instance, and my place in His universe.  And to God, as the psalmist tells us, even an entire human lifetime is like grass that springs up in the morning and dries out and dies by the same afternoon.  We may not like that idea, but if an entire lifetime dwindles into insignificance in the light of eternity, how can I take seriously the urging of even a corporation as large as Apple that their new operating system is the greatest thing to come along since—well, since we hope you can't remember back farther than last week, when we just made you give up your last 32-bit application. 

I'm not making a lot of sense here, perhaps, but I'm trying to express something about the culture of Apple, or at least the attitude it tries to encourage among its customers, that I find distasteful, unhelpful, and pernicious if carried outside the narrow field of software and applied to life in general.  It's basically the attitude that I must have the newest, latest, most advanced of everything in order not just to be happy, but to be able to function in society at all.  And because so many things we do now, from contacting friends to doing our jobs, depend on software products, Apple has the raw power to enforce that attitude at the pain of our being severely inconvenienced in various ways.  I don't expect the Apple secret police to show up at my door and haul me away if they find out I'm running 32-bit scanner software.  But just the other day, I had to let go of a Canon scanner that was still mechanically perfect because I discovered that there are no drivers available for it that are compatible with the operating system of the Mac I bought last spring.  What's the difference between having a scanner worth $100 quit working because of something Apple did, and paying a $100 fine to the cops?  Not a lot that I can tell.

Calmer heads will urge me to take the bitter with the sweet, and will remind me of all the good things I can do with computers and software that I wouldn't be able to do otherwise, and to take upgrade losses like this in stride.  Well, maybe they have a point.  But Apple in particular is running its 32-bit ban in a rather cultural-revolutionish way, and unless everybody decides to abandon Macs altogether in protest (which is about as likely as it was for 700 million Chinese to revolt in 1966), we will all have to knuckle under and give up our 32-bit applications.  All I can hope for is that my new machine keeps running a long time and I don't have to get the new OS for any reason.  And maybe those three software outfits will come out with 64-bit versions of their software, but I'm not holding my breath on that either.

Sources:  Last July 9, Computerworld carried the article  "What Apple's 32-bit app phase-out on Mojave means to you" at https://www.computerworld.com/article/3269007/apple-mac/what-apples-32-bit-app-phase-out-on-mojave-means-to-you.html.  And I also referred to an article at the PC Magazine website at https://www.pcmag.com/article/350934/32-bit-vs-64-bit-oses-whats-the-difference.

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The Sudden Death of Windows XP

Okay, it wasn't that sudden:  Microsoft announced as long ago as 2012 that, as of April of 2014, it was going to end all support of its creaky but still serviceable Windows XP operating system, so it's not like it happened without warning.  And strictly speaking, computers running Windows XP didn't die on April 8, 2014:  they just became instantly vulnerable to malware, hackers, and others who had been kept somewhat at bay by security upgrades from Microsoft.  As it turns out, this includes well-intentioned network managers such as the ones at my university, who now sniff out any PCs on their network still running Windows XP and simply snip them off the network.  But the whole episode has occasioned some thoughts on planned obsolescence, and how different computer technology is from other kinds of technology.

As it turns out, I have a dog in this fight:  an old Dell laptop in my research lab that runs a number of applications I use in my research, and its operating system is Windows XP.  The applications all run with expensive hardware I have accumulated over the years as funding intermittently became available.  One such item is a high-speed camera that cost about $15K new when I bought it a decade ago with a combination of grant and department money.  Another is a $10K spectrometer that I happened into after I met my department chair in the hall one day, and he asked me if I knew of a good way I could help him spend ten thousand dollars real fast.  The software for these items will not run on anything other than Windows XP, and the laptop is so old I don't think I can upgrade the operating system to Windows 8 in any case.  I have a little grant right now, but I've obligated most of the money toward other items and there's nothing left for software or hardware upgrades. So what's an impoverished researcher to do?

I wasn't the only person caught with my operating system down on April 8, by the way.  One estimate (www.netmarketshare.com) says that about a quarter of all PCs are still running Windows XP here over a month after the drop-dead date, so I'm sure there are millions of computers out there in the same slowly sinking boat that my laptop is in. 

In a lot of ways, the end of XP support resembles the old Y2K scare that those of us old enough to be computer-savvy in 2000 can recall.  Because programmers dealing with the limited memory in mid-20th-century computers didn't always take into account the possibility that their software might still be running on Jan. 1, 2000, they sometimes wrote dates in a way that would make the software bomb if you tried to keep them running past Dec. 31, 1999.  Fortunately, the turn of the century was highly predictable, and despite certain fringe elements who predicted a digital Armageddon, nearly all software had been successfully upgraded by New Year's Day on 2000, and the big Y2K scare turned out to be a bust.

Similarly, judging from the cricket-filled silence on the Internet concerning any dire consequences of the end of XP support after April 8, I think things have not turned out to be as bad as some people thought.  Still, I can't connect my PC laptop to the internet without getting it squelched by IT support now, and if anything goes wrong with any of the software or hardware it runs, I may find myself up a creek.

Those involved in the computer and software industries rarely think in terms of indefinitely lengthy stretches of time, although I will give Microsoft credit for announcing the end of XP support so far in advance, and sticking to their commitment.  Every design of an engineered product is an act of faith:  the designer rarely knows exactly who will use the design, how they will benefit, or how long the design will be useful.  The business model of software companies is a constant scramble to issue upgrades and new products, and in a competitive global economy, it can't very well be otherwise.  But in the rare cases that a thing shows unexpected fruitful longevity, it seems that there is a kind of nobility or merit attached to that fact that most engineers rarely recognize, having been trained in the philosophy of "old = bad, new = good" from their college days. 

I recall the story of a mechanical animation stand and camera that begin its existence back in the 1920s, and was used to make some of the earliest animated cartoons.  The same stand was still in use in the late 1990s for commercial film production, because the mechanical standards of 35-mm film had not changed in all that time. 

Animation stands are junk now, rendered that way by the advent of computer-generated images (CGI).  And motion-picture production companies that have switched to all-digital production find that it costs them a bundle simply to keep a movie on the shelf, because all the software and memory standards associated with the huge pile of digital information that goes into the movie are constantly changing, and it's a full-time job for several people just to make sure that the movie is still in shape to be played from month to month.  It brings to mind the words of the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's story Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There:  "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.  If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Those who have the resources to run twice as fast have long since upgraded their old PCs (or not so old PCs) to Windows 7 or 8 or 13 or whatever the latest version is, and will continue to keep up with the times.  And those of us who haven't, will just have to deal with the situation any way we can. 

Sources:  The online journal Computerworld carried a debate as long ago as December 2012 at http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9234316/Experts_question_Microsoft_s_decision_to_retire_XP in which experts differed as to whether Microsoft would really stick to their announced deadline, as they in fact did.  Some good advice to those who can't afford upgrading from Windows XP appeared in PC Pro's online edition at

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/387022/what-to-do-if-you-re-still-on-windows-xp-should-i-upgrade-from-windows-xp.  The statistic about the percentage of PCs running Windows XP is available at http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx.