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Comment by fredoralive | Hacker News Reader

A quick look at previous transitions shows...

Classic Mac OS support (both 68k and PPC): OS X 10.0 was released March 2001, dropped with 10.5 released October 2007. So about 6 years, 8 months.

PowerPC Mac OS X app support: First Intel Mac January 2006, support dropped with 10.7 in July 2011, so 5 years 5 months.

32 bit iOS app support: iPhone 5S with 64 bit CPU released October 2013, 32 bit app support removed in iOS 11, September 2017, so 3 years 11 months.

32 bit Intel app support (and Carbon framework): Mac OS 10.5 was first to allow 64 bit GUI apps[1], in October 2007, 32 bit support dropped in 10.15, released October 2019, so 12 years.

I'd probably count this nearer to the first three than the kinda drawn out 32 bit to 64 bit Intel transition, so perhaps about 4 years?

[1] There was limited 64 bit support before in 10.4.

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Keep in mind that there is a much larger installed base of Intel machines than any of those other transitions. Apple is unlikely to want to alienate so many people. It will take several years for the percentage of Intel Mac users to fall under 50%.

I see Intel support continuing for closer to 10 years.

I thought the same at first, but the fact that Apple dropped x86 32bit support means a lot of old unmaintained Intel binaries are already out of the equation.

While I don't disagree, Apple users also seem to be the fastest to upgrade to new versions of Apple OSes and tech. They're already like 90%+ upgraded to the new macOS, etc.

> Keep in mind that there is a much larger installed base of Intel machines than any of those other transitions.

The OP asked about Rosetta2 though. How many Intel macs are out there doesn't mean much when fat binaries can support both. This is all about software moving.

The two are connected. The more niche (or custom) software is the more resistant it is to porting. There's going to be a lot of Wintel based stuff which is a quick and dirty port from Windows with few Mac native elements. The years where Mac was Intel compatible made the platform more attractive to people who worked in a mostly Wintel environment. There is almost no incentive for those who ported software to the Mac because it was easy to now port to ARM.

So there are two sides to that: those people are going to hang on to their Intel machines longer and they'll want Intel compatibility when they finally buy ARM machines. This is important to Apple because it can shrink the pool of potential customers.

I was on the last PPC during the ppc->x86. My experience on it was that after a year it was starting to be hard to find new releases containing a ppc build already, and those who did very frequently were poorly tested. Although OSX releases continued to support ppc, at the user level it was pretty clear I was on a dead end. Even on the OSS front I had to rebuild for PPC frequently myself, as more often than not the x86 build was the only one available.

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