Get ahead with upcoming transition to new macOS Catalina
This year’s beta cycle comes with insidious new wrinkle: If you upgrade, all your 32-bit apps will stop working
My colleague Dwight Silverman last week wrote about the transition to 64-bit-only computing that the release of macOS 10.15 Catalina will bring this fall. He pretty much said everything about the whole 32-bit vs. 64-bit app thing and how it’s going to affect you.
Still, I feel obliged to issue my annual warning — DO NOT run a beta operating system on any device you depend upon.
This year’s beta cycle introduces an insidious new wrinkle for macOS: If you upgrade to Catalina, all of your 32-bit applications will cease to function.
If you’re running macOS Mojave and you’ve seen an alert that says, “This app is not optimized for your Mac and needs to be updated,” those are the ones that will die under Catalina.
It’s not too soon to begin thinking about which of your 32-bit apps are critical to your workflow. Dwight’s piece explained how to determine which of your apps are 32-bit using System Report, and includes some excellent advice on making a smooth transition.
I have only one thing to add, but the more apps you have (I have more than
500), this one thing will make your transition to Catalina ever so much smoother.
That thing is a free app called Go64 from St. Clair Software (maker of Default Folder X — one of a handful of utilities I would hate to be without). Like the System Report technique Dwight described, Go64 displays a list of your apps and identifies which are 32-bit.
But unlike System Report, Go64 includes a link to the website of almost every 32-bit app, so it’s easy (or at least easier) to find out whether a 64-bit version is available, and how much (if anything) that upgrade will cost.
It also lets you record the price of each upgrade while maintaining a running total. With toolbar buttons to launch, reveal or move the selected file to the Trash, Go64 makes the process easy.
Go64 has one other trick you won’t find in System Report: It identifies apps that are 64-bit but contain some 32-bit code — plugins, frameworks or services — which might not run correctly in macOS Catalina.
And if you rely upon 32-bit apps such as older versions of Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite, or other any other pricey old software, you do have another option: Don’t upgrade. You’ll miss out on Catalina’s improvements and new features, but all of your old apps will work, and you won’t have to spend a dime on new software (at least not this year).
It’s not ideal, but it’s worth considering if the cost of upgrading your mission-critical apps will be prohibitive.
Resources
Go64. St. Clair Software. Free. www.stclairsoft.com/ Go64/
Apple Support Article on the 32/64-bit transition: https://support.apple.com/ en-us/HT208436