They also say:
> Please note that Rosetta functionality for older, unmaintained gaming titles that rely on Intel-based frameworks will continue to be supported.
I interpret that to mean just enough of Rosetta and Intel frameworks will continue to be around, at least for macOS 28. Not specified which ones, or whether it stays any longer than that.
I’m pretty curious of what that will look like exactly, because there’s a fair amount of system frameworks/libraries needed to get to a bare minimum “hello world” AppKit app. Add on top any number of other frameworks that might be used by “older, unmaintained” games that Apple sees fit to keep supporting. Does this ensure OpenGL is kept on life support? Will they consider Wine important enough to support, perhaps even after they drop native Intel games?
I get it that macOS has to evolve, but that doesn't mean all apps have to drop Intel support at the same time.
On hardware-level apps like my Lunar app I have plenty #if arch(arm64) because some features like reading the brightness nits or reading ambient light is different or completely missing based on the architecture. I need to test the UI differences based on what features are available.
I don't see it viable to stay on macOS 26 for this, especially if we're going to see breaking changes again with the display and window server subsystem like we did with Tahoe. M5 support for Gamma table changes is still broken after so many months [0]
[0] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/819331#819331021
You don't. You could stay on an old MacOS. Apple would prefer that you tell your customers to stop being poor and buy a new computer. They will make your situation increasingly unbearable until you do.
The overwhelming majority of people haven't needed a new computer since 2016. The current economic situation makes a new computer a worse value proposition than it's been in 35 years. Vendors are responding to this situation by manufacturing obsolescence. Microsoft pulled the same stunt with Windows 11's TPM 2.0 requirement.
We're talking here about an OS that hasn't even come out yet, that will get years of security support, for computers that Apple hasn't been selling for several years now. Seems pretty reasonable.
If it was planned, Rosetta 2 would have never existed in the first place. It would have been a qemu fork haphazardly crammed into Xcode.
There was no "planning" here. Here's how I imagine it went: a developer whined about tech debt, management seized an opportunity to generate revenue, neither party considered, yknow, humans, and now we're here.
For day to day tasks there is no difference.
This is certainly an interesting way to characterize dropping support for old hardware. What is a reasonable way to go about hardware deprecation in your view?
Apple won't. We all know that. The Broadcom wi-fi chips and the subtle differences in their embedded architecture vs. conventional PCs means x86 Macs will never be adequately supported without Apple's stewardship.
Especially when I can keep getting both feature and security updates for Windows on hardware that's the same age (or older) as the EOL Apple hardware.
The reasonable way to go about hardware deprecation is to not do it until that hardware is Truly Gone™, buy some actual definition of Gone that isn't an arbitrary number of years or versions.
- Mac Classic II, the slowest of the bunch, $1.900, or about $4.661 today
- Quadra 900, the fastest model in 1991, was $7.200 ($17.663 today)
- PowerBook 170 was $4600 ($11.285)Plenty of people would even be perfectly happy on an x86 Mac, too. Sure, there would be a perceptible difference compared to a new machine, but not enough to justify the price. That's what obsoleting Rosetta is about, it's about artifically making x86 Macs so unbearable that would-be happy users have no choice but to buy something else.
Isn't this a general form of 'how do we deal with the transition from a to b?'
If your client's can get intel Mac's, then you should be able to get one. If they can't, why do you need to keep supporting intel Mac's?
For instance, consider https://tart.run/
All the Android / iOS devs on my team use Tart locally when we need to test mixed environments.
Then we use Tart's sister Cirrus CLI to run our builds on our server.
Oh hey! Thanks for making this. I've been running this app for a while now, between one and two years. Very much something that I rely on and appreciate.
In a older version of the OS running in a virtual machine?
You are trying to emulate x86 to test those builds.
Rosetta doesn't emulate x86 hardware, but translates x86 instructions into ARM. The only thing your solution would get you is verification that the Intel build can work on Apple Silicon with Rosetta.
They followed the same path when moving from PPC to Intel.
But I wonder if they're eager to drop support for the Intel TSO memory model from their CPUs.
> There will continue to be support for older, unmaintained gaming titles leveraging Rosetta along with software running Intel binaries in Linux VMs.
MacOS on ARM can't directly virtualize an Intel OS using Rosetta today using the native virtualization framework, you need something like qemu for that. But you can use an ARM linux VM with the Rosetta framework installed internally to run x86 containers, which is I think how docker desktop and similar alternatives are handling it.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...:
> There will continue to be support for older, unmaintained gaming titles leveraging Rosetta along with software running Intel binaries in Linux VMs.
Edit: "Apple says that it will continue to support older, unmaintained gaming titles with Rosetta along with software running Intel binaries in Linux VMs beyond macOS 27 . There could also be future security fixes." - https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/16/macos-tahoe-26-4-rosett...
No Apple citation shown for that, though seems plausible.
It does supposed xeyes and similar via XQuartz; I gave up trying to make xmms work though. That would have been some fun.
In all seriousness, it's a little lame. Consider that the Intel Mac Pro (2019 model) was still selling in 2023! That's not that long ago, and those were their highest end machines in terms of memory capacity. The "new" Mac Pro has since been discontinued...
(IMO it stopped making sense buying an Intel Mac after the M1 Air or if your want to be generous the M1 Pro/Max-based MacBook Pros.)
> Rosetta 2 requires almost the entire OS to have Intel support.
The implication here being that (almost) the entire OS having Intel support is not trivial.
Google might wear that particular crown: https://killedbygoogle.com
— Steve Jobs
https://youtu.be/H8eP99neOVs (WWDC '97)
This is something Microsoft will never learn, it's not in their DNA.
If they are afraid of IP leak, well, they can continue support.
My desktop I built in 2012 is still working running ubuntu, even after Intel & MS decided that it is EOL with the release of windows 11.
They are great heavily supported Linux machines though. They work out of the box gorgeously with numerous distros and being usbc is nice. For $100-200 for a mint condition model, it isn’t so bad.
Since the release of Touch Bar based Macs (which contain apple silicon) this has not been the case. The Macs that are well supported by linux and work very well were abandoned long time ago.
It was the first mass market SoC hardware test of their new Mac chip design and it seems it was also to prep macOS for the M line. The level of control Apple gave it makes repair and refurbishing very difficult without Apple’s authorization.
T2 Overview PDF https://www.apple.com/jp/mac/docs/Apple_T2_Security_Chip_Ove...
Would the M* be much better? Obviously, but that's not (yet) in the cards.
So, it looks to me application vendors who depends upon this emulation was given proper notice of this removal. So I think you should complain to the vendors instead of Apple.
Most times I tend to criticize Apple, but this time seems Apple just moving on to avoid "bloat" and "cruft" from being carried forward in future releases.
OpenBSD does things like this all the time and they get praised for it, which I agree with. Apple did the same with this and some people are upset :)
It’s almost like they did the work to get the actual game running on Apple Silicon, but installed Rosetta in the process, then just forgot about the launcher.
I always refused to install Rosetta on my Mac, so I could get a big warning if I was about to install something that wouldn’t work in the not too distant future.
The 3rd party launchers seem to exist mostly for modding. I don’t care about this. I play very infrequently, usually just with my nephews at the point, so I would rather have the simplicity of the 1st party launcher vs trusting a 3rd party and having a bunch of extra bloat I’m never going to use.
All of this is besides the point that Microsoft should have a functional launcher for a game they are charging people money for, that they claim supports Apple Silicon. If 3rd party launchers exist, it’s clearly not a technical issue that can’t be overcome. They just haven’t done it. That’s pretty pathetic considering how big Minecraft is.