"forecast for years" is distinct from "totally a good idea."
Time and resources a software publisher spends on the upgrade treadmill is time they can't spend on other efforts, whether or not there's advance notice. Essentially, it's a cost Apple imposes on developers for their platforms. And either that shows up in costs for users or the software folds.
If there's a counter to upgrade treadmill criticisms, one of the few that makes sense is if there are compelling benefits with the upgrade to weigh against the cost.
At the moment, it's entirely unclear to me what benefits I'm supposed to derive from dropping 32 bit support, and moreover, I can't think of a single compelling benefit I've derived from macOS updates since Snow Leopard.
This distinction does not seem very useful. Regardless of whether it was a good idea, developers had to decide at some point whether they should prepare for the transition or cease macOS development (unless they wanted to continue supporting old versions with a dwindling userbase).
This decision could have been made years ago. It seems to me that anyone complaining the change is too soon or too sudden is forgetting the sheer amount of time they had to decide their best course of action. It should be a question of whether to continue development at all, since that should include a transition to 64-bit. If not, then deprecate the project.
I understand may situations will not be this black-and-white, but it seems like many of them are.
> anyone complaining the change is too soon or too sudden
Notably, that's not my complaint or my point. This isn't about the timing (which is why the distinction was important).
No matter how much time someone has to prepare for a change, there's a cost to making it. And if the benefits of the change don't outweigh those costs for the developer (and the user), then a complaint sure makes sense from those perspectives.
This does intersect the issue of timing, because in a resource-constrained situation, you inevitably have to defer some efforts until they're absolutely necessary (and simply rule out doing others). But timing is not the fundamental issue, cost-benefit tradeoffs are.
> [development] should include a transition to 64-bit.
Why? What's the benefit to ending 32 bit application support?
Time and resources a software publisher spends on the upgrade treadmill is time they can't spend on other efforts, whether or not there's advance notice. Essentially, it's a cost Apple imposes on developers for their platforms. And either that shows up in costs for users or the software folds.
If there's a counter to upgrade treadmill criticisms, one of the few that makes sense is if there are compelling benefits with the upgrade to weigh against the cost.
At the moment, it's entirely unclear to me what benefits I'm supposed to derive from dropping 32 bit support, and moreover, I can't think of a single compelling benefit I've derived from macOS updates since Snow Leopard.