It happened in the 90’s and it happened (eventually) when Apple moved to the Intel chip and support for older apps was pulled after a few years.
Of course, I am referring to the every decade or so event when your applications become incompatible with your operating system and require replacement.
In most cases this means nothing, but in some it can mean your favourite accounting app – the one that has decades of financial information – will no longer run.
I don’t mean they crash from time to time or lose a feature or two, but downright refuse to run.
This happened on iOS with the release of iOS11 but MacOS 10.14 (no doubt coming out later this year) is rumoured to support only 64bit apps, so it is about to happen to your Mac as well. While on iOS it is usually a case of hoping onto the Appstore and downloading the latest, MacOS is a far more complex beast so it is undoubtedly not that easy.
I won’t bore you with the techie Mumbo Jumbo but basically a 64bit application is written to access more memory and therefore run better and faster.
So when MacOS goes full 64bit your older apps will most likely refuse to run.
To ensure that you are not caught up in a black hole the day after you upgrade, or purchase your new Mac, it would be a good idea to make sure that none of your favourite/important applications are sitting on death row.
It’s a simple process but before I show you, keep in mind that a great deal of what you find will not read as familiar. But fear not, this probably means they are support files that will be upgraded when the OS is upgraded.
My advise is to scan the list and look for big ticket or important items, those that will will cost money to replace and that you’d be lost without.
Here we go…
- While holding the Option key, click on the Apple menu in the top left corner and choose System Information.
- Scroll down on the left sidebar until you find the heading Software.
- Click on the little triangle to expand the menu.
- Click on Applications.
(If you have a lot of applications this will take a while to load)
- On the far right, at the top there is a menu option to sort by 64-Bit apps.
- Click on the heading and you’ll sort the list into Yes and No.
The 32-bit apps will be labeled No and these are the ones you need to be aware of.
