macOS 26 and rosetta

it's well-known by now that macOS 26 (or 16, 26 was last minute) will be the last intel-supported macOS version. from then on, it's apple silicon only.

obviously, this means all intel macs will die. this happened in 2009 with snow leopard dropping support for PowerPC. though technically that change didn't arrive until later, as the first beta had a good porton of PPC code leftover that allowed for the existence of custom builds that support PPC.

rosetta

rosetta (2) is a feature of apple silicon macs that allows x86_64 mac programs to run on arm macs via x86 emulation. this stretches back M-series mac app support back to at least 2007, when the first 64-bit intel macs surfaced and some experimental apps were compiled for the AMD64 platform. OS X 10.4 had its own counterpart, rosetta 1. this allowed PPC apps back to 2001 (the original OS X release) to run on the then-shiny new intel platform. PPC OS X wasn't around for that long by the transition point, only about 4-5 years old around that point. naturally, apple eventually killed rosetta 1 in 2011 with OS X 10.7. that was fine.

 

the current issue is that intel macs lasted long. really long. 13 years of 64-bit intel programs, specifically.. that...is an extremely long time. for apple to kill rosetta 2, you would lose a gigantic portion of the mac application library. this much application loss is unprecedented. not even the death of the classic environment was this vast, only spanning 10 years of PPC apps from 1991 to 2001, from the first PPC mac to the death of OS 9 in 2001.

 

killing this many apps will destroy so much of macOS' history, and it's poised for removal in either macOS 27 or 28. the loss will be felt, and it will be difficult.