Ending macOS Intel Support
Ernie Smith (via Hacker News):
And today, we learned that Apple is finally ending its 20-year run of Intel-based Macs.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that they gave the public one more year of new versions, along with the promise of potential security fixes, avoiding an uncomfortable rug-pull like the one that many PowerPC users experienced with Snow Leopard in 2009.
Andrew Cunningham (Hacker News):
Apple will provide additional security updates for Tahoe until fall 2028, two years after it is replaced with macOS 27.
[…]
Apple is also planning changes to Rosetta 2, the Intel-to-Arm app translation technology created to ease the transition between the Intel and Apple Silicon eras. Rosetta will continue to work as a general-purpose app translation tool in both macOS 26 and macOS 27.
But after that, Rosetta will be pared back and will only be available to a limited subset of apps—specifically, older games that rely on Intel-specific libraries but are no longer being actively maintained by their developers.
I don’t really understand this last bit. They’re going to keep shipping Intel versions of all the frameworks, but only certain chosen games can use them? Apple still maintains the code, it still takes up space on everyone’s Mac, but users don’t get to use it to run old apps? I could see Apple just killing Rosetta, and I could also see a case for fully supporting it for longer. This middle ground seems weird.
With Rosetta 2 support winding down, time to revisit backing up the installer for offline use. This update addresses batch downloading RosettaUpdateAuto.pkg for all macOS versions from 11 through 26 beta, comprising 472 files totaling just under 150MB.
Rosetta 2 itself has always been small, so the fact that it was a separate download seemed like a political or licensing decision. It’s the system frameworks that take up most of the space.
Previously:
- macOS Tahoe 26 Announced
- Should Game Porting Toolkit Be Built-In?
- Apple’s Mac Gaming Push
- The Trouble With Mac Gaming
Update (2025-06-11): Rich Trouton:
Apple has not described what will happen with Rosetta 2 beyond macOS 27, beyond stating that they will be keeping a subset of Rosetta functionality available to support certain Intel-based frameworks. The goal of the support for these not-yet specified Intel-based frameworks is to allow older unmaintained gaming titles to run on macOS past macOS 27.
The just-announced Containerization stuff also uses Rosetta 2, potentially in their own data centres, so I can’t see them discontinuing it any time soon.
See also: MacRumors.
Update (2025-06-12): John Gruber:
With the 68K–PowerPC transition, they supported 68K Macs through Mac OS 8.1, which was released in January 1998. With the PowerPC–Intel transition, they only supported PowerPC Macs for two Mac OS X versions, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (which initially shipped PowerPC-only in 2005) and 10.5 Leopard in October 2007. The next release, 10.6 Snow Leopard in August 2009, was Intel-only. (Mac OS X dropped to a roughly two-year big-release schedule during the initial years after the iPhone, when the company prioritized engineering resources on iOS. It’s easy to take for granted that today’s Apple has every single platform on an annual cadence.)
“Take for granted” isn’t quite the phrase I would choose.
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Rosetta 2 works in VMs right? But VMs aren't really good for running games?
So you run the "chosen games" in the "special games Rosetta" directly, and everything else in a VM.
"But after that, Rosetta will be pared back and will only be available to a limited subset of apps—specifically, older games that rely on Intel-specific libraries but are no longer being actively maintained by their developers."
I too would like to see the source for where that information came from. It's just put out there like someone at Apple told him that, but on its face doesn't make sense.
It seems like it was put out there as an implied threat to get as many people as possible to port their code.
And the fact that it was a separate download absolutely was a political decision, just like it was to say that. Apple wants to put just a little bit of friction into it to encourage people to only use apps that are AS native. When people see the installer prompt, people who don't know exactly what they are doing are as likely as not to simply cancel it and choose something else that doesn't cause the prompt.
But it seems to me no matter what they threaten, some code will never be updated. They either want to keep support for Intel code or they don't. The more I think about it the less sense that statement even makes.
@Bart If it’s for a technical reason, all I can think of is that maybe they want to ship a more limited set of frameworks, but I’m not sure how that maps to what games need.
The official statement is at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/about-the-rosetta-translation-environment/
Maybe the macOS 28+ versions of Rosetta will include the frameworks, so the default installation can remain ARM-only?
@Michael exactly, how could they know? And now all of a sudden they're interested in preserving "legacy" games? That ship basically sailed away with Catalina.
@remmah Maybe, but that seems like an invitation for them to get out of sync when you update the OS. Or maybe they plan to somehow freeze the Intel versions of the frameworks? That seems like a hard problem given that private stuff is always changing underneath.
@Bart Yeah, they lost a lot of games with the 64-bit transition.
I wonder if it's a contractual question of supporting old Apple Arcade games forever. The initial batch were released before the ARM transition was revealed.
"is to allow older unmaintained gaming titles to run on macOS past macOS 27"
So Bolo? Syndicate? Escape Velocity? Wolfenstein 3D? SimCity 2000? What a time to be alive!
way easier is to execute in terminal softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license
and have this windows opened before executing the command to copy and paste the downloaded package quickly. it gets deleted after installation so move quickly.
/Library/Updates/Rosetta/OnDemand/
I'm wondering if the new Containerization framework can be used in this plan. They indicate that Rosetta2 would available (presumably with Intel versions of frameworks) in a limited way for certain titles. Sounds like a lot like a container or VM, frankly.
But I haven't played with the new Container tools much yet.
It's disappointing that Intel users will be stuck with the first release of a revamped macOS user interface.
It reminds me of the poor souls with Macs that had a final supported release of 10.7 Lion, they were left with the very broken New Document Model that was only fixed in 10.8 Mountain Lion.
