I count the days up to the 3rd wednesday of October 
You forget that DxO already supports these OS and is a cross-platform application. Wow, if every developer gets this lazy (I understand you are a solo operator with all those limitations of time and expertise) and only offers us what Apple serves on a silver platter, the software scene will go downhill quickly.
If DxO releases Catalina only Photolab 5, DxO will lose my financial support and I will be very active to make sure any potential buyers know just how poorly DxO supports its paying users (by forcing users to upgrade OS and computers every year).
iMacs and MacBook Pros that are nearly ten years old
iMacs are e-waste machines. Anything goes wrong with all the hardwired components one can throw them away instantly, makes no sense to repair them. All those laptops have soldered in everything. The computers I own run Photolab 4 (and everything else) very well. There is no issue at all with performance. All four of those computers are limited to Mojave though.
A huge amount of productivity is lost by this annual update frenzy. Two year update cycles increased the productivity of the labour force. The one year update cycle with all the broken software and software conflicts now (across at least two platforms for everyone, desktop OS and mobile OS, if not three, add tablet OS) means productivity decreases every year. Admittedly Facebook and social media play a role in decreased productivity as well.
Iâve said this before and Iâll say it again: DxO does not owe Apple any favours and thereâs no reason DxO should be trying to sell new hardware for Apple. DxO does not owe its developers that many favours (they are paid no?). The people DxO owes favours to are us its users (we pay them) and even more Photolab evangelists (we spread the word; I hope DxO marketing department donât think that paid advertising works and particularly without grassroots support).
If DxO wants to run the most user-hostile support for existing OS policy among photo processing tools, then DxO should pay the price for such a policy.
Small players like DxO should really be working to broaden the tent, not build walls around it and ejecting users.
@StevenL I hope someone at DxO is listening.
Offering unlimited backwards compatibility is expensive. Every time a software company adds in another version, that then means maintaining dedicated test machines for the older OS versions, having to write yet more conditional code and re-writing tests to include to manage that conditional code, running those test on more machines, managing regression testing for issues tha might affect one version but not another, etc.
One could argue that you are being perfectly well supported for PL4. Unlike Adobe, who stop your software working if you stop paying, DxO allows you to continue to use a certain version for as long as you like - thus they are supporting paying users. If you donât want to buy the next version, then you will no longer be a paying user of PL5 and DxO will not be obliged to support your use of PL5. It is not DxO that are forcing users to upgrade every year, it is people who want the latest and greatest version that do that to themselves. If PL4 does what you need, do you really need PL5?
Not forgetting that Apple are the ones at the root of the upgrade churn. If you use Macs for your living, then you should know what you signed up to and planned their upgrade into your running costs. Yes, I do appreciate that it is hugely wasteful to have a machine that is demoted to scrap for no other reason than the latest version does things better/faster/etc but, I could say, if that is an issue for you, why not move to Windows?
I used to maintain the Windows computers for a local company and would have to visit them usually once a week to fix problems, tidy things up, etc - which was nice easy money for me but cost them. One day, the motherboards in both of their main âserverâ machines failed. I recommended looking at Mac computers to replace them and, despite early reservations about being more difficult to use (because they were unfamiliar), after about 3 months, they realised that they were no longer having to call me in because everything âjust workedâ. So, for them, yes, they had to pay for Apple computers but they also didnât have to keep paying me. Hang on a minute - I just sold myself out of an income 
Donât forget it is because they are small players that it is all the more difficult. But, possibly to your dismay, I can see the whyâs and wherefores.
I would also ask what you would do if Apple decide to stop supporting Mojave in a year or soâs time now that 64-bit only and M1 architecture have become the norm?
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My deepest apologies, Joanna, these are largely silly questions to which you already know the answer if youâve been reading my posts. As you have a horse in the race (your application which does not offer any backwards support at all), it seems to have slanted your perspective on software compatibility hopelessly.
To answer this specific question: when Apple discontinues support for Intel CPU and Photolab discontinues support for Intel CPU, I will be very open to arguments about OS versions incompatibility. Because then, unlike now, such arguments would make sense. When we get there in five years, Iâll cross that bridge.
Not forgetting that Apple are the ones at the root of the upgrade churn
Trying to point the finger at Apple is a poor excuse. The other photo software development companies manage to support OSâs back to Sierra.
As you know well, Photolab is full cross-platform software with a large development team. To suggest that Photolab is completely dependent on Appleâs tools for core functionality and performance is risible.
Adobe
Bringing Adobe into the question is pointless. I donât use and wonât use Adobe software on principle. Who cares what Adobe does or does not do? A more user-unfriendly (takes over oneâs computer with background processes and launch agents) and spyware driven set of software (uploading everything to the cloud no matter how hard one tries to stop it) which cannot be bought but only leased cannot be imagined outside of direct ransomware.
move to Windows
Again, why are you trying to make decisions for me or take my hardware and software away from me if I wonât agree to play upgrade musical chairs. Not to mention, that if youâd been paying any attention when reading my posts you would have seen that there is absolutely nothing I like about Microsoft (apart from backward compatibility). Windows 8 and Windows 10 are telemetry ridden spyware from the beginning. Before Adobe became a wicked software company, Bill Gates created the rules for evil user-unfriendly, state-sponsored spyware. Iâd be moving to Linux if I move.
But I have no intentions of moving. I paid for the machines on which I run Appleâs OS, I paid for some of the OS directly and paid for the other OS indirectly. Why should I give it up due to someone elseâs update circus?
No, one cannot safely use an older version of Safari as a main browser. Chromum and Opera continue to support back to El Capitan 10.11.
The good versions (relatively headache free and stable) of OS X have been final versions of 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.8 Mountain Lion, 10.11 El Capitan, 10.14 Mojave. Running anything else (and I had a large dose of High Sierra, which broke lots of second monitor display port sorts of things, or Yosemite which broke lots of core networking) was mostly a pain-in-the-neck. If one values stability and reliability, one should never install any version of OS X which is not on the last or very last point update.
Apple is on a user-unfriendly path of releasing sub-standard software which alienates existing longtime users. Apple is blessed by the core UX standards and the absence of meaningful competition. Windows is ugly old spyware Windows, while Linux is hopelessly fragmented with almost no desktop commercial application support. Taking Appleâs abuse of market position as a model for anything would be a mistake as RAW development and keywording tools are not monopoly or duopoly situations.
your software
By making your software latest OS only, no support for previous systems you are basically cutting yourself off from your market. Iâd say your market is the same people who use FastRawViewer who have one of the best backward-compatibility records in the business. Last month Iliah just launched v2 which moved the minimum system requirements up to 10.12 Sierra. Thatâs one (High Sierra), two (Mojave), three (Catalina), four (Monterrey) back from current. Iliah had the good manners to apologise. V1 supported 10.6.8 Snow Leopard.
Libraw.comâs Iliah Borg is a one-man shop with cross-platform apps.Yyour complaining that it canât be done and itâs too hard suggests you donât understand your market and may be inadequately qualified to build or maintain such software.
run Photolab 4
Yes, DxO can choose to cut me off after Iâve invested more than âŹ500 in their software. And I can choose to be unhappy about this and share my experience about how DxO treats its users.
DxO and Photolab have enough enemies on the photo forums and among pro photographers. Making more among their most ardent advocates is an extremely poor strategy. Over the last twenty years, the French have become accustomed to coming in second or third tier more and more often in terms of software and technology. Upside-down strategies like this (cutting off loyal users to suit a multinational who could care less about DxO) are why. DxO are not a monopoly nor a duopoly (nor does DxO have the backing of the US security and regulatory agencies) and cannot get away with the same anto-user behaviour that Google, Facebook and Apple allow themselves.
DxO should be widening the tent not pushing people out. @sgospodarenko
Hi,
The dates of availability of the differents versions of PL:
PL1 - Wednesday, October 27, 2017
PL2 - Wednesday, October 24, 2018
PL3 - Wednesday, October 23, 2019
PL4 - Wednesday, October 21, 2020
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October 27, 2017 was a Friday.
October 24, 2018 was the 4th Wednesday.
October 23, 2019 was the 4th Wednesday.
October 21, 2020 was the 3rd Wednesday.
The only consistency I can find is âthe last full week of Octoberâ (where âfull weekâ is Monday to Sunday). October 2021 ends on a Sunday so who knows? Well⊠we know who knows. 
âAbout two weeks awayâ seems a reasonable approximation now.
Unless something has changed it will likely be either Wednesday the 20th or the 27th. Not very long in either case.
Mark.
This kind of questions are doomed to be swirl in what ifâs.
Leaking and teasers are prohibedded for the EA members so we wonât lift any curtains of new features nor confirm any statementâs.
So the only answer would be we able to give honestly is âWe suspect it to be launched in october.â
And " i think you will like it."
And when itâs launched and in the open, only then and not earlier, we will help every one to find the highlights and improvements. 
So everyone can decide themselfs if they want to upgrade or wait for the v6.
Sorry if i disapoint anyone at this moment.
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Besides hardware support, another factor is software. Typical users have many applications on their machine and not all of these applications run under all versions of the OS. This is a reason why I had to chose to âstay behindâ by a version or two in the past. Running a virtual machine may help but is not always the solution to such problemsâŠ
While I agree with you about the cost of keeping compatibility, not keeping it has a cost too, possibly losing some users. I guess (and hope) DxO is doing market research on this. But even when the result says 95% of the users will be ok, it is still better not to lose the last 5%. 
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Yes, it is better to not lose those 5%, but in the end each company has to make a cost-benefit decision which may include factors that are unknown to us. Since some have argued that other software firms are able to provide support for more OS versions than DxO, it might be helpful if DxO could explain their reluctance to providing similar support.
Mark
Anyway, isnât PL5 development a done deal by now? Canât and wonât speak to your contentious Apple / DxO issues. But can say that I have been running LR and PL on various Windows PCs for a long time and without significant issues. The Windows side of the forum has featured lately a few graphic card / motherboard queries about DeepPRIME but little else. My legacy scanner / photography applications, some ancient, still run on WIN 10 and WIN11, and drivers are usually installed directly or are easy to obtain. Recent updates to WIN11 went smoothly for me and PL4E seems to work just fine. So, I guess that sums up MY digital photography experiences with the evil ones. Sorry, not (yet) buying the Microsoft conspiracy theories.
I have a MacBook Pro mid2012 under Catalina and I will be able make it work with PL5.
The result is that this computer will have had a life span of 10 years(*); thatâs not bad I think!
Of course, like Alec, I would have liked the support to last longer but Joannaâs arguments seem to me to be largely valid.
Itâs the same with my other favorite software, 4D, which cannot guarantee backward compatibility beyond 2 versions but still works with old versions.
- I expect to buy an ARM Mac in less than 6 months.
I am not surprised by the quasi-announcement of a new version but, as I thought I was registered as a beta tester, I didnât get any information about it.
The next version will be released within the next two weeks or so. If you had been registered as a beta tester for PhotoLab 5, DXO would have communicated with you about it sometime before last Christmas.
Mark
Well I am perhaps registered for PL6 
They have not asked for beta testers for PL6 yet. That will probably take place in November. You need to visit this site often, otherwise you may miss the notification asking for beta testers.
Mark.
I cannot in all honesty say I would contribute properly to the beta program, but I think Iâve found more than a few bugs and inconsistencies in the last 12 months anyway. 
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Mark, the point is that when DxO is only supporting OS from the last two years, itâs not 5%. Itâs quite a few more. And quite a few professional photographers and graphic designers. Creative people have creative work to do and most donât like to waste time on OS updates and OS incompatibilities.
DxO has a very small minority position in the photo tools market. Driving away its pro users and its advocates in some scorched earth minimum compatibility drive is about the stupidest technological/marketing strategy Iâve ever seen.
Iâll remind you that DxOâs OS compatibility record is by far the worst among the major players at this point. Avec les Français, il faut compter toujours sur une arrogance nuisible Ă eux-mĂȘme. With his arrogance, NapolĂ©on destroyed la Grande ArmĂ©e. Instead of Emperor of Europe, NapolĂ©on ended up slowly poisoned to death by the British on a distant island. Un destin aussi ignoble que inutile.
Keep making excuses for your chouchou. Sadly, excuses wonât help PhotoLab gain any marketing share on Lightroom or Capture One.
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Alec, the 5% figure wa not mine. I was responding to @Xavierâs post and he indicated 5%. I was just parroting him. I have no idea what the actual percentage of users would be. I agree the loss of users as a result of not supporting enough previous versions of MacOS should be addressed by DXO. Given the frequency of new Mac versions I hope DXO will reconsider supporting one or more additional OS versions unless there is a good technical reason why that is not possible.
Mark
Hope itâs good stuff to justify my defacto subscription. 