At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, held June 3 – 7, 2019, one of the key announcements was the introduction of macOS 15, to be known as macOS Catalina. As is usual for new macOS versions, the final version will be released to Macintosh users this coming fall, but beta versions were released immediately to Apple developers.
It’s inexpensive to sign up as a developer. And free public builds will be available in July so many people will start running Catalina right away so they can “try out new stuff.” But be warned…
InDesign CS6 and Earlier Versions Are 32-bit and Will Not Work
For a year or two, Apple has been pre-announcing that its next version, macOS 15, would not support older 32-bit applications, and now the time has come for this decision to be put into action.
On June 5, MacRumors reported:
“…macOS Catalina does away with 32-bit app support, so some of your older apps are going to stop working. The operating system will let you know which apps are now defunct once you upgrade.”
InDesign CS6 and earlier versions are 32-bit and will not run in macOS Catalina.
Unlike Photoshop CS6 and Illustrator CS6 which were updated to be 64-bit applications earlier, InDesign was not updated to 64-bit until the first Creative Cloud version InDesign CC 9.0, which was released in June 2013.
The result is the only way to run InDesign CS6 and earlier are to continue to run on them macOS 14 (Mojave) or earlier—assuming that those Mac versions can run older InDesign versions. None of those pre-Creative Cloud InDesign versions are supported by Adobe, so you’ll be on your own.
Be Sure to Back Up Your Macintosh Operating System and Your Software
It’s a usual good practice to make a backup of your system, including its software, before making a major operating system upgrade. However, as with most backups, this advice is ignored by the majority of users.
Come this fall, many users of the “perpetual” (non-subscription) versions of InDesign will simply update their operating system to Catalina, assuming that everything will run as usual. If they have made a backup, they can use their backup to return to an operating system version that will run InDesign CS6 or earlier and they’ll still have their working copy of InDesign. And you’ll hear cries of anguish from those who are surprised because their copies of InDesign no longer run. And they’ll have no older operating system to return to.
This article was last modified on May 6, 2020
This article was first published on June 22, 2019
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