The bane of everyone's existence. No thanks. I'm glad one company at least isn't willing to do that. I've had it up to here with "Windows XP is good enough for me, make your software run on it" types.

On the one hand I agree with you: on the other I quite like the fact that relatively large bodies of code I wrote 12 years ago still run unmodified (albeit in Windows desktop apps that have received updates and enhancements since then).

Due to these updates I don't know that they would still run on Windows XP but it's nice that the code hasn't needed to change.

Much of the code needs nothing more than a recompile. It’s just no one is doing that.

To run 32 bit stuff you need copies of all the system libraries. You lose a lot of RAM to that. You have to continue to ensure they don’t have bugs. All for apps that are abandoned.

I totally understand what apple is doing. I bet you a ton of those apps were never updated for iPhone 6 screen shizes either.

You would only lose the RAM and the disk space if the 32bit support is actually needed and installed. What’s better - having unused RAM and your app refusing to launch, or using RAM to run your important legacy app?

Oh, for sure - iOS is a different world from Windows though, and it's annoying when apps are left to rot. Does make me think twice about which apps to invest in nowadays though.

Backwards compatibility doesn't come without trade offs in security, maintenance, resource usage, etc.

How far back should Apple go with backwards compatibility?

Do you also think that modern Macs should support 65C02 from the Apple II days? 68K Mac programs? PPC Mac programs?

Apple dropped 32 bit processor support in 2011. They will probably drop 32 app support in the next two years.