Seriously, OS X went 64bit 12 years ago. X86 has been 64bit for longer.
Maybe, just maybe, the problem is developers refusing to actually move forward.
It’s especially galling given game devs are the group that most prominently complains about OS X being behind the times.
As for “needlessly” dropping 32bit: if your poorly written 32bit app starts up you necessarily force OS X (and the user’s machine) to pull in 32bit variants of almost the entire platform. Thanks for that. It also means Apple has to maintain 32bit versions of every framework. I can speak from experience here: maintaining a 32bit version of javascriptcore was a massive amount of work. Every new JS feature needs duplicated JIT work, and needlessly complicates the entire JSC codebase.
That aside, Apple manages to do this - and I can’t imagine your game approaches the complexity of an entire OS -so if you can’t make your software work on a 64bit system then the problem is your code, not Apple.
The number of 32bit intel macs is surprisingly small, too. Core Solo/Duo models ran from January to November 2006 (bar one mac mini model that survived into 2007).
I'd be very surprised if there's a 32bit mac that'll run their game acceptably well. I'd be surprised if it's ever actually supported 32bit macs. So why was it 32bit in the first place?
Ok, but if the game is only a few years old why didn’t it compile for 64bit?
I recognize MS insisted on screwing the market by selling 32 vs 64 bit as separate versions of Windows for many years, but even then surely most windows machines have been running 64 by default for a decade?
But seriously: if you make a new piece of software in the last 15 years that only works in 32bit, then you made a choice to target an obsolete platform with worse performance (again, game developers complaining about perf while only building 32bit so throwing away 10-20% perf for no reason strikes me as hollow)
I mean, I agree with you completely but what I've found is that a lot of games, whilst are 64-bit themselves, often have a lot of dependencies that, for whatever reason, still have 32-bit binaries in there somewhere.
I occasionally wonder why Mac/ia32 existed as well.
My conclusion has been that when Mac’s first switched to intel there was a combo problem - intel’s mobile chips were still mostly 32bit (remember intel dropped the ball on 64bit), and more importantly while ppc mac’s were capable of 64bit (the G5 cheese grater) the majority of the desktop was iffy, coupled with things like flash, etc that were 32bit.
Also pretty much everyone else - I just checked the status of all the apps present on my Mac (System Report) and the only 32-bit apps on here are QuickTime Player 7 (long-deprecated) and a bunch of garbage Adobe background update processes.
Yup, complaining about deprecating 32bit seems to primarily be a choice by game devs who care about frame rates, but will happily throwaway 10-20% perf win that you get on x86_64
Maybe, just maybe, the problem is developers refusing to actually move forward.
It’s especially galling given game devs are the group that most prominently complains about OS X being behind the times.
As for “needlessly” dropping 32bit: if your poorly written 32bit app starts up you necessarily force OS X (and the user’s machine) to pull in 32bit variants of almost the entire platform. Thanks for that. It also means Apple has to maintain 32bit versions of every framework. I can speak from experience here: maintaining a 32bit version of javascriptcore was a massive amount of work. Every new JS feature needs duplicated JIT work, and needlessly complicates the entire JSC codebase.
That aside, Apple manages to do this - and I can’t imagine your game approaches the complexity of an entire OS -so if you can’t make your software work on a 64bit system then the problem is your code, not Apple.