[normaljoe]

I wouldn't call Apple's decision a mistake, they knew exactly what they were doing and their long term plan required it. The relative insignificant size of user base that still needs 32 bit support is dwarfed by all devices that will never need that. Apple has always been quick to drop backward compatibility to support innovation both at hardware and software. They dropped floppy support and CD/DVD support eons before the rest of the desktop market. Since they own the complete stack at this point and with everything SoC, at some point they will start saving die space not wasted on 32 bit support. To get there however requires they start pushing the software first.

[hedora]

I recently took the list of the commercial software that supported MacOS that I’ve paid for over the years and checked current platform compatibility.

Twice as many packages run under Linux than under MacOS, specifically because of the lack of 32 bit support.

[normaljoe]

While that may be tragic, it still is the intentional effect and hardly a mistake. Apple focusing on its $250B iPhone market over its < $50B Mac market very much makes sense. When they removed 32 bit support we might have guessed at Apple Silicon on the desktop, and lo and behold that did come to pass. The Intel to ARM transition was much smoother than the PowerPC to Intel move in part because of 2 vs 4 versions in the Universal Binaries. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that Apple was also aware of ARMs forthcoming complete removal of AArch32.

[mrpippy]

Are you talking about games? Or old versions of apps?

I know of very few actively-maintained 32-bit Mac applications that didn’t make it to 64-bit: MathType and AccountEdge are the ones I remember right now.