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Comment by stu2b50 | Hacker News Reader

Rosetta 1 had a ticking time bomb. Apple was licensing it from a 3rd party. Rosetta 2 is all in house as far as we know.

Different CEO as well. Jobs was more opinionated on “principles” - Cook is more than happy to sell what people will buy. I think Rosetta 2 will last.

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What important Intel-only macOS software is going to exist in five years?

It's basically only games and weird tiny niches, and Apple is pretty happy to abandon both those categories. The saving grace is that there's very few interesting Mac-exclusive games in the Intel era.

Yeah, Apple killed all "legacy" 32-bit support, so one would think there's not much software which is both x86-64 and not being actively developed.

2006 Apple was very different from 2011 Apple, renewing that license in 2011 was probably considered cost prohibitive for the negligible benefit.

Rosetta 2 can run 32-bit software, there just isn't a 32-bit macOS anymore so the only client is WINE.

Starting with Ventura, Linux VMs can use Rosetta 2 to run x64 executables. I expect x64 Docker containers to remain relevant for quite a few years to come. Running those at reasonable speeds on Apple Silicon would be huge for developers.

We’ll see, but even post-Cook Apple historically hasn’t liked the idea of third parties leaning on bridge technologies for too long. Things like Rosetta are offered as temporary affordances to allow time for devs to migrate, not as a permanent platform fixture.

They’ve also allowed Rosetta 2 in Linux VMs - if they are serious about supporting those use cases then I think it’ll stay.

> Rosetta 1 had a ticking time bomb. Apple was licensing it from a 3rd party.

Yes, I'm sure Apple had no way of extending the license.

> Cook is more than happy to sell what people will buy. I think Rosetta 2 will last.

There's no "buy" here.

Rosetta is complexity to maintain, and an easy cut. It's not even part of the base system.

And “what people will buy” certainly didn’t prevent essentially removing support for non-hidpi displays from MacOS. Which is a lot more impactful than Rosetta as far as I’m concerned.

> removing support for non-hidpi displays from MacOS

Did that really reduce sales? Consider that the wide availability of crappy low end hardware gave Windows laptops a terrible reputation. Eg https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/yof7va/frien...

> Consider that the wide availability of crappy low end hardware gave Windows laptops a terrible reputation.

Standard DPI displays are not "crappy low-end hardware"?

I don't think there's a single widescreen display which qualifies as hiDPI out there, that more or less doesn't exist: a 5K 34" is around 160 DPI (to say nothing of the downright pedestrian 5K 49" like the G9 or the AOC Agon).

dpi isn't the right metric. you don't keep a phone the same distance as a 49" monitor.

DPI works fine as long as the type of device is in the context. The context here is desktop/laptop.

DPI is absolutely the right metric, the target goal just depends on the usage.

A hidpi computer display is north of 200 (iMacs are a bit below 220, MacBooks a bit above).

A phone is north of 300 (iPhones have ranged from 324 to 476).

Ehh I had a 2013 MacBook pro back in 2013 with a 2560x1600 display. That's 227 dpi. A decade later, I think it's safe to say that anything smaller than that is extremely low-end in 2022.

I agree it's kinda sad how few desktop monitors are high dpi. It gets even worse if you limit yourself to low latency monitors.

Anyway I haven't used macos in a while so I'm not sure what you mean by Apple not supporting non-hidpi

The actual screen dimensions make a huge difference to whether or not a given DPI value is low or high end. My current monitor is 157 DPI and I can assure you it is not an extremely low end monitor at all. Unless your frame of reference is anything below $5k is low end or something.

Right, what I meant to say is that anything under 1600p is low end because it was already widely available in 2013.

What do you mean non HiDPI display support being removed from Mac OS? I’ve been using a pair of 1920x1080 monitors with my Mac Mini M1 just fine? Have they somehow broken something in Mac OS 13 / Ventura? (I haven’t clicked the upgrade button yet, I prefer to let others leap boldly first).

> Jobs was more opinionated on “principles” - Cook is more than happy to sell what people will buy.

Well, the current "principle" is "iOS is enough, we're going to run iOS apps on MacOS, and that's it".

Rosetta isn't needed for that.

It's strange to see people downvoting this when three days ago App Store on MacOS literally defaulted to searching iOS and iPad apps for me https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1589179351572312066

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