I bought a new Macbook recently which run Catalina (OS X 10.15) which is basically no different to OS X 10.11 or 10.10 – the only difference is that it slows your computer down if you are on an older model. Since Steve Jobs died innovation at Apple basically stopped; all the new devices is just the same as before but maybe with an extra camera or a bit more RAM or a faster CPU. The laptop that I bought is no exception compared to the Macbook Air that I bought 8 years ago.

I use Adobe Photoshop CS6 which requires Java 6 SE; it’s supposed to be an older version of JAVA but it actually does the job; but the JAVA downgrade that Apple offers doesn’t work for Catalina (10.15) – https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US; it should but they just deliberately made it so it doesn’t.

I found a great post online on how to fix this:-
https://www.harrisgeospatial.com/Support/Self-Help-Tools/Help-Articles/Help-Articles-Detail/ArtMID/10220/ArticleID/23780/Mac-OS-Catalina-1015-ENVIIDL-and-Legacy-Java-6-Dependencies – It really works and I was surprised.

The error message that you will receive is “A Newer Version of this package is already installed” but it’s not.

I followed the instructions on the Harris Geo Spatial website and managed to generate a package that I was able to use to install JAVA6 SE; to save people hassle I have uploaded here and you can download it directly to save yourself from following the steps yourself. You download:-ModifiedJava6Install.pkg

I also download JAVA 7 too which can be downloaded here – it needs X86_64 architecture:-
jdk-7u80-macosx-x64.dmg