It’s built using Metal 2 (https://developer.apple.com/metal/) which is only available on High Sierra. I guess they carefully weighed the pros and cons before making this decision!

For comparison, Affinity Photo offers all of software, OpenGL and Metal rendering. I suppose at least supporting the previous version of Metal would not have been a massive burden. It's not like it's a completely different API.

This stems from use of CoreML, a High Sierra-only API used for the content-based layer naming.

It would have been nice if that had been a feature-flag that only turns on when running on High Sierra, but I'm guessing they decided that level of modularity was too much dev/testing overhead.

> As an example, it still annoys the hell out of me that a zoomed in image that is not completely visible always sticks to the edge of the window it's in—good luck selecting anything at or near the edge.

I've been using Pixelmator quite a bit lately, and that one just drives me nuts.

I think I made a thread about that on their support forums maybe 5 years ago? They're never going to fix it.

I'll give the Affinity products a chance when they fix bone-headed missing features - like a way to change the ruler origin. This is a particularly egregious omission in Affinity Designer. They have been promising this non-optional feature for almost 2 years now.

Was very, very disappointed to notice that it required High Sierra, especially given the current state of its security.

They lost a purchase from at least a serious dedicated fan, here, for that one.

I never want to run High Sierra or iOS 11. Clearly, I will be required to at some point when I upgrade my iPhone/Mac hardware, but... <sigh>

Why does every Apple release feel like one step forwards, two (or two dozen) steps backwards?

I'm still on Mavericks and never plan to upgrade. Every new Mac OS now seems to be a major regression in basic functionality in the name of more eye candy, more Apple lockin, and more crap I have to turn off just to get work done. I'm done. I just bought a Dell XPS 13, installed Linux on it, and I'm not looking back.

Apple is pushing me there for sure.

The latest MacBook Pro is not so pro anymore. 16gb ram is embarrassing in 2017.

Maybe it wouldn't be if people stopped coding everything in node.js.

Try running a couple of test VMs, an IDE with code completion on top of a decent sized code base and you’ll be swapping like crazy even with 16GBs.

While I agree with you that node.js is bad, that's not even my issue. I use Vagrant extensively and I might want to spin up 2 or 3 VMs with 2-3GB of ram to test $thing.

Now, I can do that (3*3 == 9 < 16) but, really, it makes the rest of my system just run terribly.

I would personally pay a $1000 premium over the current MacBook Pro for a version with 64GB of RAM.

Because you are not their target market.

For everyone else - including many developers and power users - they are selling well (very well).

Because the media says so?

Because not enough people stop buying/using their products.

I love Pixelmator. I would definitely pay the $60 for pro, just for the single-window interface; but each new OSX version just gets worse. I've planted my feet in Yosemite, until either things turn around, or gets old enough to force me onto full-time Linux.