This is why Rosetta 2's looming retirement sucks.

Cassell 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Is there an actual reason for it, apart from Apple hurrying devs along?

For the consumer, the benefits of backwards compatibility are obvious, but it’s sad that companies don’t see it as a selling point.

Well, we wouldn’t want anyone using their perfectly functional copy of Photoshop CS6 would we…

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GeekyBear an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

x86 gaming and running x86 Linux software are the exceptions.

> Starting with macOS 28, Rosetta 2 will be largely discontinued. Apple says that after that point, it “will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.”

https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/16/macos-26-4-will-notify-users-...

It's the Mac native x86 software that hasn't been updated in most of a decade that would be affected.

	▲	benoau an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Retro gaming What they say is "we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks" which sounds like OS X games. But even if it is all-inclusive "retro" games, that means the 1,000s of contemporary games runnable via Crossover through Steam for Windows are being shut out. They relented under pressure to continue allowing Linux virtual machines, so hopefully they continue to revisit this decision. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...
	▲	nottorp an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's an "I'll believe it when I see it working on my machine" matter. As my sibling post says, it's more likely to work only for some older mac os native games.

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zokier 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I thought dosbox had its own x86 emulation layer so it should work fine on any arch?

	▲	f055 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Dosbox has its emulator to run DOS, but afaik dosbox binary that starts up dosbox on Mac uses Rosetta on M-series Macs, and without Rosetta it simply won’t start and emulate DOS.

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a1o 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This would be very bad for Wine too. I think Wine has some answer to this, since Wine does run on Android, but I think it won’t make the current easy path that is just brew install wine and be done.

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ptek an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Enjoy paying for your yearly Adobe subscription as your shrink wrap software won’t work.

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smith7018 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I get why Apple wants to remove it but it genuinely sucks. I can't imagine it costs them a lot to put it into maintenance mode and just support 20 years of macOS games and apps going forward. They want developers to fully move to ARM but older titles or software whose developers have moved on/passed will be lost to the sands of time.

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chii an hour ago | parent | next [-]

If they choose to discontinue it, it would be nice to have them opensource it so that the community could have a go at maintaining it tbh. Surely that's better than letting it rot (both rosetta and the old software that it runs).

	▲	ryandrake an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That would be ideal, but given Apple's general hostility towards Open Source, it sounds extremely unlikely. I wonder what it would take to re-implement it. If it's "just software," I suppose there is a chance, not that I'm volunteering :)

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fragmede an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I imagine that the area it takes up on the chip is non-trivial and so it'd cost them a ton to continue to have it.

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rimunroe an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I thought Rosetta 2 was a purely software layer

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fwip an hour ago | parent [-]

Rosetta 2 is software, but there are design decisions made for the M-series chips that are specifically made to improve the ability of Rosetta to work in a performant way. The main one I'm aware of is the x86-TSO memory-ordering mode - most ARM chips don't support this, but the M-series have it so that Rosetta can toggle it on for x86 emulation.

I'm not sure what the total cost of these are, but it's not zero.

	▲	kbolino an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There's another big one, 4K page support. The MMU can be told to set up a virtual address space with smaller, x86-compatible 4096-byte memory pages instead of the default 16384-byte pages.
	▲	mrpippy 37 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Those are still needed for the Rosetta use-cases that are sticking around (old games, Linux binaries)

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wat10000 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s software.