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macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

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Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#81

Post by mrpippy »

andor wrote: post #60
zitterbewegung wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The page doesn’t actually say that explicitly

True, Apple's developer and support pages are not all fully up-to-date or explicit. From the macOS 26.4 release notes (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.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#82

Post by mrpippy »

stetrain wrote: post #7
kalleboo wrote: post #4

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.

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 altern…

Correct, that is staying around.

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.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#83

Post by mrpippy »

tyingq wrote: post #15

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-rose…

See https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#84

Post by malshe »

ryukoposting wrote: post #57
tsunamifury wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a MacBook from 2017 and and m3 air today. For day to day tasks there is no difference.

Eerily similar story here. My wife was using her 2017 MBP (the one they got sued over) and she adored it until Tahoe suddenly caused Chrome to run like hot garbage. I bought her an open-box M3 Air. She likes the color. It doesn't provide any more value to her life than her 2017 MBP did, and yet we're out $1000 because Apple said so.

So on the one hand you are so much aware of the obsolescence issue and on the other hand you just decided that upgrading a 2017 MBP to Tahoe is a good idea? I am on a M4 Pro Mac mini and it is still running Sequoia.

Btw she can downgrade to Sequoia from Tahoe.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#85

Post by malshe »

apetrovic wrote: post #46
ryukoposting wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

That's overly dramatic. I don't think a new Macbook Air today is a worse value proposition than some Mac from 35 years ago. I just checked Apple prices from 1991: - 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)

All his comments are overly dramatic.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#86

Post by al_borland »

bombcar wrote: post #73
al_borland wrote: post #37

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,…

Do people even use the Microsoft launcher on Mac? Everyone I know (which may say more about me than the market) uses a third-party launcher.

I use a 3rd party launcher only because the Microsoft one doesn’t support Apple Silicon.

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.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#87

Post by protimewaster »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #67
ryukoposting wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> Apple would prefer that you tell your customers to stop being poor and buy a new computer. 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?

I think one thing that rubs people the wrong way is that Apple has basically infinite money at this point. They're not dropping support for old hardware because they don't have the resources to maintain the support. They're just doing it because they want to, and that's kinda lame.

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.

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#89

Post by bombcar »

al_borland wrote: post #86
bombcar wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people even use the Microsoft launcher on Mac? Everyone I know (which may say more about me than the market) uses a third-party launcher.

I use a 3rd party launcher only because the Microsoft one doesn’t support Apple Silicon. 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…

I've been using 3rd party so long I didn't even know the launcher wasn't a Java program itself; is it a compiled executable? Maybe I should download Minecraft directly ...

Re: macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

#90

Post by jeroenhd »

lxgr wrote: post #64
jeroenhd wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting, do you know if performance is roughly comparable with Rosetta 2, i.e., are we talking about a few percent of overhead or something more dramatic? (For CPU-bound code; I understand that the overall effect will be smaller due to GPU code probably being executed host-side in native code etc.)

FEX isn't done yet, but Valve's people seem to suggest an overhead between 10-20%. Not great for getting the most out of a CPU, but small enough to compensate say the difference between an M1 and an M5 chip.
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