[ken]

You were lucky. Apple doesn't guarantee long-term compatibility of applications on Mac OS. You bought just after the latest Mac transition, so your ten years didn't happen to cross any big one (OS X, 2001; x86, 2006).

I bought some Adobe software in 2001, and it was a gigantic pain to get it working under early OS X (hours on the phone with Adobe), and wasn't usable under Rosetta, 5 years later.

If the rumors and historical trends are to be believed, we're on the verge of another transition. I would not buy an expensive binary blob for Mac today without an assurance I could get an upgrade, if/when there's another architectural transition.

[c0nsumer]

I ran into this yesterday. I use Illustrator infrequently, in spurts, to do mapping work for a non-profit that donates our volunteer time to work on mountain bike trails in parks. I last purchased CS6 on a non-profit license because my of minimal use --- a week or two at a time every six months or so --- which really doesn't fit with the subscription model.

I hadn't fired it up since updating to Mojave, and last night when I went to update one of our maps I found that Illustrator CS6 pretty much isn't usable. It's so ridiculously slow that trying to type out a string of text on a blank artboard beachballed and took almost a minute for the 20 characters to display.

The workflow can't move to Affinity Designer because it's not really compatible with AI files[1], and I really don't want to get into the subscription model because even the non-profit license is $200+/year. Thankfully the CS6 perpetual license is for Windows as well, so I can spin it up in a VM... And MS is really good at backwards compatibility.

But it really sucks not being able to use it natively as I have for years.

[1] It'll open the PDF portion, but for a map with lots of complicated lines, these get changed from single paths in Illustrator to lots of curves in PDF. It's a mess trying to put these back together.

[benrbray]

Good thing I'm on Windows :)