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Comment by thw_9a83c | Hacker News Reader

> ...they don't want to maintain and build and test x86_64 versions...

This feels wrong. Apple sold Intel-based Macs until early June 2023. The last one was the 2019 Mac Pro model.

Ending support for Rosetta in macOS around 2028 also means ending support for any x86_64 versions of software. This means that those unfortunate users who bought an Intel Mac Pro in 2023 only got five years of active usability.

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Just because the latest OS isn't able to be installed on older hardware does not mean the hardware in no longer usable. I know people to this day that still run the last 2012 cheese grater MacPros with Snow Leopard as daily work machines. They still use Final Cut 7 on them to capture content from tapes. At this point, they are very fancy dedicated video recorders, but they still run and are money making devices.

You're right; I still have a 2010 MBP w/8GB of RAM and a SSD upgrade I made to it years ago. My mother still uses her similar vintage MBP with the same upgrades. These work just fine for most non-work tasks.

That doesn't mean that I expect these things to be updated or supported 15y after I bought them. I am absolutely certain I made the back $850 I originally paid (edu discount) + the ~$250 in upgrades over the years and I'm entirely ok with just letting it limp along until it physically dies. I think most people have similar expectations.

I still have my 2011 MBP with very similar upgrades, but unfortunately, it has the known bad Nvidia GPU that has been repaired multiple times. The last time it was taken in for repair, Apple said they were no longer supporting the repair. It's still usable as long as nothing tries to access the GPU, but as modern web tries to use GPU it would crash the laptop constantly.

Lucky you, so to speak. Back in the day I had the same one, but it would pass their diagnostics, so they wouldn't repair it, though I could literally make it crash in front of the Genius Bar techs reliably and repeatedly (essentially the same way, by trying to do anything that hit the GPU a certain way - websites, Photoshop). "Sorry, our diagnostic tool says it's not the GPU". At one point I even demanded they do a completely fresh install of the OS. On first login, I fire up Safari, go to a certain site, crash. Restart, go to a different site, crash. "Sorry."

I liked out in that mine never developed any issues with the GPU itself. Though it was stolen in 2014, so who knows longer term. My daughter is still running my (iirc 2014) model. I've been relatively happy with my 16gb M1 Air, aside from my own vision issues.

The last security update for Snow Leopard was in 2013. Friends don't let friends connect software that vulnerable to the internet.

The hardware can be ok, the walled garden is not.

Production networks like these are typically not on the internet. That's a bit of information that I take for granted that people not familiar with would not.

What does this have to do with typical consumers who purchased a 2023 Intel Mac only getting 5 years of security patches? Typical users connect to the internet.

“Those systems will continue to receive security updates for 3 years.” - looks like 8 years in total.

You got it wrong.

Rosetta is the technology that allows Apple Silicon hardware to execute Intel software. When they introduced Apple Silicon with the M1 processor, not many binaries existed for Apple Silicon, so Rosetta2 was a bridge for that problem.

They used the same technology (Rosetta 1) when they switched from PowerPC to Intel.

Pretty much every binary for macOS is distributed as a "Universal Binary", which contains binaries for both x86 and Apple Silicon, so x86 isn't being abandoned, only the ability to run applications on Apple Silicon that hasn't been redistributed / recompiled in 6-7 years.

No, I didn't get it wrong. The moment Apple stops supporting to run x86_64 binaries on ARM (M) CPUs, everyone including Apple will stop making Universal Binaries. Because (among other reasons, like lack of motivation) there will be no easy way to test the x86_64 part of the binary. The Intel MacOS era will be over. Just 5 year after Apple sold the last Intel-based Mac Pro.

Is that really a problem though ?

Unless you’re doing something special, you can be fairly certain that universal binaries will behave well on both platforms, that’s what Apple guarantees. They expose one API, which can be executed on multiple hardware architectures.

If you’re doing something special, like an image editor, or a game, you might need to test performance, but you couldn’t really do that with Rosetta either.

Universal binaries work well. And as long as they exist, apps will most likely run just fine on both Intel hardware and Apple silicon.

I don't think the ability to cross-compile things will go away when Rosetta is phased out, though.

But how can you test it if your ARM-based Mac cannot run it? Most software vendors will simply stop making x86_64 builds.

Keep older hardware at hand?

Sure! The point is that it wasn't necessary because of Rosetta. For example, I no longer have an Intel-based Mac, but I still want to build and test for x86_64.

I understand where you are coming from and commend you for trying to support your users (I'd do the same!), but I don't think Apple marketed Rosetta 2 as a permanent solution after the transition.

Another aspect is, a Mac stops getting software updates after ~7 years, and then the API level starts to drift between the latest macOS releases.

So, after 10 year mark, you can't get the latest versions of the applications already since the features developers use aren't available in the older macOS versions and you can't run the software anyway.

There’s someone out there who wants to build for PowerPC. At some point you have to say it’s a tiny piece of the market and making a few people spend $300 for old hardware is better than maintaining back compat forever.

The difference is there is still a lot of x86 software written for windows, which you will need x86 emulation to run it through whiskey/crossover on a mac.

And for x86-64 Windows builds, you should be testing using an x86-64 Windows machine, not Rosetta 2

I am writing from a user perspective, rather than testing your builds.

More issues generally arise from supporting/qualifying older OS versions than supporting specific architectures in my experience, so developers keep around older hardware or VMs for that purpose. In some other circumstances Rosetta may not be sufficient for testing older Intel hardware (one example is work on GPU)

It's reasonable to say this is wrong. But really, this seems like a tiny subset of users. Who bought a Mac Pro in 2023 after Apple Silicon had been out for 3 years already? Almost nobody, because it wasn't a real performance improvement by that time. For those extremely niche folks for which it was somehow still beneficial, they definitely won't want to still be using such a machine in 2028. They will have moved on to something like an M5 Ultra Mac Studio or whatever form the Mac Pro takes next.

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