This is gonna be a mess of an upgrade, mostly because of the 64-bit thing. The forum is gonna explode once its released and people start installing it. Of course it will be all Apple's fault when developers have had many many years to get their shit all 64-bit. Its not Apple's fault the developer(s) have dragged their feet on this. They all knew it was coming eventually. Its not like macOS being only 64-bit was a secret thing that crept up on them.
People have had warnings since High Sierra. So if they chose not to upgrade apps, that is their problem. It is not that hard to have an external drive with an older version of OS X to run 32-bit apps, or run a VM. I have a VM of Snow Leopard Server for older PowerPC stuff, but then I can also run them natively on my G5 or G4 Power Macs.
...I'd still be content running snow leopard with faster hardware, or at least having choice, and I would buy new hardware, but unfortunately Apple seems to differ... New hardware demands a just beta release 'macOS' dependance. Is genuine customer choice an option, other than maintaining and upgrading older hardware...? Is Apple further locking that down with T2 ? Will the last bastion iMac be the last post this fall...? Is this (since SJ) the Apple we want ?
It will be too expensive to replace all the 32-bit apps like Indesign.
Has anyone got a good VM/parallels solution?
Otherwise i am gong to have to skip for the first time in 18 years.
The general pubic is completely unaware of what Catalina will bring. Many will be auto-updated without knowing their 32 bit apps are dead. Apple tech blogs and the Apple Discussion Forums will be deluged with outrage and condemnation. They will claim that Apple should have called them individually to tell them what was going to happen. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see a class action lawsuit filed because of this. i had hoped that Apple would come up with some kind of transitional Rosetta-like framework to ease the pain. Believe me, the typical user pays no attention to those pop-ups warning their software needs to be updated.
The more customer focused companies will have already made their products Catalina ready. I use Epson printers/scanners and over the past year Epson has been slowly updating their utilities to 64 bit. The last straggler, Event Manager, was just updated a few days ago. From what I can see on my system all the Epson software is now 64 bit and I expect there will be no problems with the move to Catalina on my Epson WF-2860 all-in-one. I don’t know about HP, Brother, Canon, and others.
Yes this is exactly my point. People will just upgrade this because a notification will pop up about installing a new macOS and they will click on yes. Then afterwards, a whole bunch of shit may not work without anyway of going backwards. I'm telling ya now Apple is gonna catch a whole bunch of undeserved shit for this release because of these incompatibilities.
This is gonna be a mess of an upgrade, mostly because of the 64-bit thing.
Only for people that totally ignored all of the reminders that Mojave would be the last OS to support 32-bit. That change is not a surprise. Plus, the easy workaround is to clone your current drive to an external disk and boot from that if you still need access to certain 32-bit apps.
A normal everyday user isn't going to know this. You have to remember we here in AppleInsider forums and other tech blog forums are not your average everyday user. They're not gonna know about the incompatibilities nor do they understand them. They aren't going to create partitions (nor do they know you can even do that) and install Catalina in a separate partition. This is just unrealistic.
This is gonna be a mess of an upgrade, mostly because of the 64-bit thing.
Only for people that totally ignored all of the reminders that Mojave would be the last OS to support 32-bit. That change is not a surprise. Plus, the easy workaround is to clone your current drive to an external disk and boot from that if you still need access to certain 32-bit apps.
Exactly: macOS literally provides a warning every time a 32-bit app is opened, and will show the warning multiple times, not just once. Additionally for popular apps such as Office - the dialogue is customised to tell you what the new software is called and a click through to the app store to get it.
It will be too expensive to replace all the 32-bit apps like Indesign.
Has anyone got a good VM/parallels solution?
Otherwise i am gong to have to skip for the first time in 18 years.
Yep and there are many reasons why keeping some older apps may be important, my Fujitsu SnapScan will only work in my Sierra VM for example. So ... to answer you, yes you can, I just made a VMWare Fusion loaded with Mojave ISO and used Apples' Migration Assitant to move a clone of my current Boot drive into it. The trick was to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the boot drive to an external SSD. Once done boot into it and remove anything you don't want to later transfer and also go into Settings /Sharing and change the name of the computer from the being the same as the main boot drive. I also logged out of iCloud and made sure Photos was not using the iCloud. Oh and turn off Time Machine if it is on.
Then boot back normally and *create a VM with the Mojave ISO, I'd suggest doing this on an external drive, not the boot drive that will be updated to Catalina soon. I tested both Parallels and VMWare Fusion and both work, cavitate they have to both be latest versions else they cannot understand APFS nor will the VM Tools work.
Make sure not to set up the Admin user in the VM with the same name as your main computer (the one you cloned). Once the VM is created you need to make sure it is large enough.
*I could not make one the size I needed from the get-go. I did use the create settings to make it larger but the resulting VM wasn't larger. It is something weird about APFS that requires fiddling with Disk Utilities once you are running the VM. Had this been an HFS+ set up this would have worked far easier. Anyway, I managed to get a 1 TB VM with Mojave in the end.
Now just launch the VM and attach the external clone to it and run migration assistant from within the VM, select the clone disk from any options you see (not Time Machine it failed every time for me) and migrate away. Once finished you have two users of the VM and if it boots into the initial one you made you see the other one as a separate Drive due to the way VMs and APFS Containers interact. Just use Settings disk startup to set the other one as the startup disk and restart the VM.
I am sure if I did this a few times I could avoid using two users, so treat this as a rough guide you can adapt but this worked and I have a full duplicate of my boot drive running in a VM in the same Mac. So when I update to Catalina I can have Mojave at the same time.
Looking at the Apple Catalina Web site https://www.apple.com/macos/catalina/ I think whomever did the site for the Danish Apple page misplaced the number 4 as on the USA site it references a footnote about it belonging to Apple Arcade & Apple TV+ info.
That's an excellent catch by you. I think you're absolutely correct.
Comments
People have had warnings since High Sierra. So if they chose not to upgrade apps, that is their problem. It is not that hard to have an external drive with an older version of OS X to run 32-bit apps, or run a VM. I have a VM of Snow Leopard Server for older PowerPC stuff, but then I can also run them natively on my G5 or G4 Power Macs.
A normal everyday user isn't going to know this. You have to remember we here in AppleInsider forums and other tech blog forums are not your average everyday user. They're not gonna know about the incompatibilities nor do they understand them. They aren't going to create partitions (nor do they know you can even do that) and install Catalina in a separate partition. This is just unrealistic.
Then boot back normally and *create a VM with the Mojave ISO, I'd suggest doing this on an external drive, not the boot drive that will be updated to Catalina soon. I tested both Parallels and VMWare Fusion and both work, cavitate they have to both be latest versions else they cannot understand APFS nor will the VM Tools work.
Make sure not to set up the Admin user in the VM with the same name as your main computer (the one you cloned). Once the VM is created you need to make sure it is large enough.
*I could not make one the size I needed from the get-go. I did use the create settings to make it larger but the resulting VM wasn't larger. It is something weird about APFS that requires fiddling with Disk Utilities once you are running the VM. Had this been an HFS+ set up this would have worked far easier. Anyway, I managed to get a 1 TB VM with Mojave in the end.
Now just launch the VM and attach the external clone to it and run migration assistant from within the VM, select the clone disk from any options you see (not Time Machine it failed every time for me) and migrate away. Once finished you have two users of the VM and if it boots into the initial one you made you see the other one as a separate Drive due to the way VMs and APFS Containers interact. Just use Settings disk startup to set the other one as the startup disk and restart the VM.
I am sure if I did this a few times I could avoid using two users, so treat this as a rough guide you can adapt but this worked and I have a full duplicate of my boot drive running in a VM in the same Mac. So when I update to Catalina I can have Mojave at the same time.
Once running the VM you need to log into the App Store and verify with a code from Apple so as to be able to use any Apps purchased there.