The point is it's always slightly risky to upgrade, and if there aren't life-changing new features this time around (which there aren't) then in the short term you're simply rolling the dice and simultaneously losing compatibility with all 32-bit apps. It's for these reasons that for the first time in years, I'm not immediately updating.
That's fine, though. There's nothing that says that you can't stay on the version of the OS that you're using until you decide not to.
That decision, though, comes with the consequence that you likely won't be able to run new software. If you're not worried about new software and don't want to be until the point comes where you need new software, the updates have always been optional.
Sure, as long as they keep fixing bugs and issuing security updates for the older OS's. But Apple Support articles start with "Update to the latest version of macOS and try again"
There is also no particular reason that I can tell why certain features are only added to the latest OS, though we have become desensitized to this. For example - why can't the ability to extend the Mac desktop to the iPad be added to Mojave?
>why can't the ability to extend the Mac desktop to the iPad be added to Mojave
Likely because there's a part of the iCloud stack that was set up by code that's not in Mojave. Additionally, that was never advertised as a feature of Mojave so I fail to see why there would be any expectation that this would be added to Mojave.
> Likely because there's a part of the iCloud stack that was set up by code that's not in Mojave
That's my point - if it's a software requirement then it can in theory be added to say Mojave 10.14.7.
> that was never advertised as a feature of Mojave so I fail to see why there would be any expectation that this would be added to Mojave
This is software, so I highly doubt that the real reason is technical (why can't the code be added to Mojave?) just that Apple feels they may suffer long term if they reward people for not updating to major releases, or it's too costly to maintain so many forks of macOS.
I wouldn't care nearly as much if Catalina didn't drop support for 32-bit apps.
What was wrong with being able to run both old and new software? I thought that was a perfectly fine middle ground, and now the customer MUST decide between old vs new. Does not sound good to me, at all. I would pick Linux instead. :)
>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 years ago and 2 OS versions ago. This was not a surprise.
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.
