We’ve heard rumours for a few years that Apple is considering shipping MacBooks which use the Ax ARM chips that power their phones and iPad pros. Those CPUs have excellent performance per watt, and decent performance overall. If they’re planning on repeating the Rosetta play that they pulled off during the PowerPC -> Intel transition, it might make a lot of sense to deprecate i386 applications first so there is less surface area they need to emulate. The x86 instruction set is way too complicated as it is without having architecture modes to worry about.
Apple has the ability to both support i386 software on x86 machines, and choose to not emulate that software on future ARM machines. If your supposition is correct, Apple is effectively crippling their current products in order to make their future products seem less bad by comparison. That's horrible.
And in the process, Apple is asking developers to rewrite i386 code for an amd64 architecture which they ultimately intend to abandon anyway.
Maybe. Maybe? I doubt they're motivated by malice or laziness, but nobody in this thread can say one way or the other. What I can say with high confidence is that unless we're in the meeting room at Apple we can only speculate based on little to no hard information. It's entirely possible that there are sound engineering reasons behind what they've done.
AMD64 is going to be around for a very long time; any developer that is having difficulty migrating code from i386 has more fundamental problems than Catalina.
