The official statement from Apple (emailed to developers 10 days ago) is that macOS 27 is the “final release to support Rosetta”, so the title is a bit off.

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?

Apple seems to slightly care about supporting Codeweavers/CrossOver from things I've seen, which indirectly makes Wine, Rosetta 2, and GPTK "important enough to support" since they're important features

I read that as "Rosetta2 for 32 bit" will still be around, somehow.

Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on?

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

> Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on?

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.

I think it's a stretch to call Apple's ARM transition "planned obsolescence". The M-series chips are very clear improvements on what came before and there is a clear rationale for that transition.

I still prefer my pre-2016 Intel Mac since I can do more things that I want to do on it than my newer M4.

Keep a macOS 26 machine around for testing. All Intel Macs will be stuck on 26 as well, so testing under 26 is probably best anyway.

>Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on?

So apps that support intel would only support macOS 26 and would go in maintenance mode with bug fixes only. All apps that run on macOS 27 will run on Apple silicon only with new features. I think thats how Apple sees it. If Apple Silicon Macs have issues that break functionality of your apps then thats not a good enough reason for apple to keep investing Intel Macs. It's been 6 years and the writing has been on the wall for sometime (I am surprised apple supported Intel Macs for such a long time).

Maintaining old hardware costs money when it comes to software. While I understand that newer hardware doesn't mean better, those days are gone and in my experience, and at a certain point the choice has to be made to abandon old hardware completely and ask customers to buy new. Thats the whole point of making new products from companies like Apple.

The niche problem I see is where software and hardware is running for critical applications (like maybe accessibility) which cannot be just switched over. But Apple is no longer that company. They have stopped caring about niche for a while.

Virtualize macOS 26 for testing purposes: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/01/21/what-can-you-do-with-vir...

> Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on?

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?

Keep an Intel Mac around or drop support.

They followed the same path when moving from PPC to Intel.

Keep an Intel Mac around?

Arguably if you're shipping new fat binary code today, you should already have an Intel Mac around to test, because there might be subtle differences between Intel-on-Rosetta2 and Intel-on-Intel.

Same way you test them now?

I hope they keep around the underpinnings for Rosetta 2 (without the macOS parts) just to keep supporting Intel virtualization for things like Docker. Heck then anyone who really needs to run some old Intel app can run a virtualized older version of macOS.

But I wonder if they're eager to drop support for the Intel TSO memory model from their CPUs.

Apple will keep Rosetta 2 support for Intel virtualization. See https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...

I read somewhere that the part that allows a virtual machine to use Rosetta inside the VM is sticking around.

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.

Same here. Would be very sad to lose Wine capabilities as well, and presumably these have minimal macOS dependencies.

Wine can run on aarch64 with FEX reasonably well already, no special instructions or hardware acceleration required. There's a bit of extra overhead, but that shouldn't be a problem for old games on modern hardware, they should run about as well.

Anonymous mirror: https://xcancel.com/Lina_Hoshino/status/2046112493320458649

I'm curious what options that leaves for docker. I assume the pattern of building/running linux/amd64 containers on MacOS is pretty widespread.

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.

I bet it must feel good for the macOS engineers to remove the intel support. Probably much easier to do development for the OS as well

As a consumer, I’d like to see the end of “universal” builds for various apps. It made sense for a while but downloading and installing ~60% larger bins just doesn’t make sense 6 years later.

Wow and darn I guess last support update to fully depreciate intel MacBooks. Used prices already are cratered.

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.

>They are great heavily supported Linux machines though.

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.

Whatever. We have public utility OS, all the hardware vendors should be forced to provide open-source working drivers after they stop supporting their hardware.

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.

Related? "Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45692116 24-oct-2025 335 comments

Focusing is about saying no.

— Steve Jobs

https://youtu.be/H8eP99neOVs (WWDC '97)

This is something Microsoft will never learn, it's not in their DNA.

This seems less about why it won't be supporting Intel and more about why Rosetta 2 will be going away, which seems mostly related to cleaning up code that is no longer necessary once Intel is not supported.

Maybe Microsoft will finally update the Minecraft launcher to support Apple Silicon. Last I looked they tried to close the bug report, someone reopened it, then there was a system migration and I lost track of it.

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.

I am missing something ? If I read the link in xcancel.com correctly, it says what I would look at as "intel emulation" will be removed in the next release.

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 :)

Bad headline. This tweet attempts to explain why Rosetta 2 will no longer work. Which is because the OS no longer supports the Intel platform. That does not explain why the OS does not support the Intel platform.

Because it costs them money to maintain it, and they'll make more money when people upgrade to M series?

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...

But it does?

> 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.

Because Apple is the King of Deprecations. And they get away with it.

> Because Apple is the King of Deprecations.

Google might wear that particular crown: https://killedbygoogle.com

Apple is the King of Hardware Deprecations. Google is the King of Software Deprecations. You're both right.

executive decision