It has been brought to our attention that older versions of Capture, versions before Capture 2025, might not function well on macOS Tahoe. We have received reports of purple screens replacing various parts of the user interface.
These issues were present in versions of Capture 2025 too, specifically those before Capture 2025.1.6. The reason they are not present after Capture 2025.1.6 is that we spent time on adjusting Capture's behaviour in order not to upset macOS Tahoe as a result of behavioural changes in macOS. That kind of work is something we would only undertake on our active product version.
That means that the moment we release a new major version of Capture and the previous version becomes discontinued, the previous version will not be adjusted to overcome any breaking changes in a Windows or macOS release.
The benefit of our "five year policy" is that you can skip several major Capture versions without paying for an upgrade. If you plan to use this to your advantage you need to be careful with operating system updates though, just in case they cause any issues like this. (Which in fairness is a good strategy with any software that you depend on either way.)
I have the same problem with Capture 2023. Does this mean that my software is now useless? I launch it and get a black screen. Will there be a software update? How does it look from your side? Theoretically, the programme is supported for 5 years.
I have just cross-checked the download pages, the FAQ texts and the reference manual and I can't really agree with your statements Floriaan. The download pages specify both minimum and maximum OS versions The FAQ and reference manual recommend using the latest version drivers, even with a specific note for macOS, where they are built in, to use the highest version macOS supported.
If you can point a specific text on the site that you think is wrong we're happy to review and fix it, but I think this is a case of the combination of wishful thinking and not reading through the details carefully enough. We have plenty of technical and detailed texts on our website that are occasionally misunderstood. Every time we consider adding extra clarifications to avoid misunderstandings we end up in the same conclusion - more text and information sections are not likely to solve the problem.
Practically speaking we do work on making sure that Capture in general works on the latest versions of Windows and macOS. But when there are breaking changes it's usually not just a simple flick of a switch on our side, but a fair amount of work that needs to go into it. Our licensing terms are quite generous in that we don't require a subscription or ugprades, but the inevitable side effect is that any system upgrade, be it hardware, OS or drivers, could render an older version of Capture unusable. The amount of work it would take to actively maintain and ensure that five major product versions, up to five years old, keep running on such a span of operating systems is something we would have to charge more for than the cost of upgrading to the latest version of Capture.
Thank you for your response, Lars. I do fully agree with your policies. You would need to spend too much time maintaining older OS versions. I think the text on the download pages is also clear as (liquid) glass ;-)
I would add the same to the older reference manuals (currently 2021 - 2024) as soon as the version goes out of active development. If I have an installed version of Capture there is not much chance that I would re-visit the download section of your website. I would check the reference manual in stead to see if the new version of macOS that I am about to dowload, is supported. If it just states "version x or later" I would assume it doesn't hurt to switch to the new Major version of the OS.