macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore | Hacker News Reader

macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

twitter.com

68 pointstasoeur100 comments

https://xcancel.com/Lina_Hoshino/status/2046112493320458649

The official statement from Apple (emailed to developers 10 days ago) is that macOS 27 is the “final release to support Rosetta”, so the title is a bit off.

They also say:

> Please note that Rosetta functionality for older, unmaintained gaming titles that rely on Intel-based frameworks will continue to be supported.

I interpret that to mean just enough of Rosetta and Intel frameworks will continue to be around, at least for macOS 28. Not specified which ones, or whether it stays any longer than that.

I’m pretty curious of what that will look like exactly, because there’s a fair amount of system frameworks/libraries needed to get to a bare minimum “hello world” AppKit app. Add on top any number of other frameworks that might be used by “older, unmaintained” games that Apple sees fit to keep supporting. Does this ensure OpenGL is kept on life support? Will they consider Wine important enough to support, perhaps even after they drop native Intel games?

Apple seems to slightly care about supporting Codeweavers/CrossOver from things I've seen, which indirectly makes Wine, Rosetta 2, and GPTK "important enough to support" since they're important features

I read that as "Rosetta2 for 32 bit" will still be around, somehow.

I wonder if Apple cares about docker/podman which uses rosetta on amd64 images

Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on?

I get it that macOS has to evolve, but that doesn't mean all apps have to drop Intel support at the same time.

On hardware-level apps like my Lunar app I have plenty #if arch(arm64) because some features like reading the brightness nits or reading ambient light is different or completely missing based on the architecture. I need to test the UI differences based on what features are available.

I don't see it viable to stay on macOS 26 for this, especially if we're going to see breaking changes again with the display and window server subsystem like we did with Tahoe. M5 support for Gamma table changes is still broken after so many months [0]

[0] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/819331#819331021

Keep an Intel Mac around?

Arguably if you're shipping new fat binary code today, you should already have an Intel Mac around to test, because there might be subtle differences between Intel-on-Rosetta2 and Intel-on-Intel.

It works until that machine dies and you need to scramble for a solution (again).

Keep a macOS 26 machine around for testing. All Intel Macs will be stuck on 26 as well, so testing under 26 is probably best anyway.

Same way you test them now?

> 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 worse value proposition than it's been in 35 years. Vendors are responding to this situation by manufacturing obsolescence. Microsoft pulled the same stunt with Windows 11's TPM 2.0 requirement.

I still prefer my pre-2016 Intel Mac since I can do more things that I want to do on it than my newer M4.

I think it's a stretch to call Apple's ARM transition "planned obsolescence". The M-series chips are very clear improvements on what came before and there is a clear rationale for that transition.

We're talking here about an OS that hasn't even come out yet, that will get years of security support, for computers that Apple hasn't been selling for several years now. Seems pretty reasonable.

I have a MacBook from 2017 and and m3 air today.

For day to day tasks there is no difference.

I have a MacBook Pro from 2016 and an M4 Pro from last year. There is a night and day difference.

I think "M series chips are no better than ten year old Intel chips" is a take that would be somewhat difficult to sustain, given the data.

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.

Shame on my wife for doing what she has always been told to do, and updating the software on her laptop.

And why the hell would I know that? I was 8 years old the last time I used a Mac. This is shit I shouldn't have to know.

Try using it unplugged.

For developers, the difference is like night and day.

My 2019 MacBook Pro used to sound like a jet plane taking off whenever I did any sort of build. On a bad day, I could've baked some cookies on it. Admittedly, the corporate spyware that was constantly scanning every single file didn't help matters.

I said "manufactured," not "planned." I don't think Apple intended to do this at the outset. Tim Cook wasn't leaned back in an office chair, twirling a moustache saying "yes, let's make every mac made before 2019 SUCK!"

If it was planned, Rosetta 2 would have never existed in the first place. It would have been a qemu fork haphazardly crammed into Xcode.

There was no "planning" here. Here's how I imagine it went: a developer whined about tech debt, management seized an opportunity to generate revenue, neither party considered, yknow, humans, and now we're here.

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)

"Value" and "price" aren't the same thing. A new computer in 1991 cost more, but it also covered a vastly increased set of use cases versus a machine from 5 years prior (assuming the hypothetical 1991 computer buyer had even owned a computer before). Today, you can buy a used MBP with an M1 and it will do everything a new MBP can do, and the differences compared to a new machine will be imperceptible to most users.

Plenty of people would even be perfectly happy on an x86 Mac, too. Sure, there would be a perceptible difference compared to a new machine, but not enough to justify the price. That's what obsoleting Rosetta is about, it's about artifically making x86 Macs so unbearable that would-be happy users have no choice but to buy something else.

All his comments are overly dramatic.

> 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.

This isn't even just an Apple attitude. The whole macOS and iOS software ecosystem has this "nothing before the prior two OS releases exists anymore" attitude, and it is absolutely infuriating. It is absolutely possible and not a huge lift to support prior operating systems, but Mac developers just don't tend to care or do it.

The reasonable way to go about hardware deprecation is to not do it until that hardware is Truly Gone™, buy some actual definition of Gone that isn't an arbitrary number of years or versions.

When a company obsoletes a hardware platform, as Apple will do with this update, it is their moral duty to open the platform. Release the necessary source code, blobs, and docs to allow independent actors maintain their equipment, or maintain that equipment on behalf of its owner.

Apple won't. We all know that. The Broadcom wi-fi chips and the subtle differences in their embedded architecture vs. conventional PCs means x86 Macs will never be adequately supported without Apple's stewardship.

> Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on?

Isn't this a general form of 'how do we deal with the transition from a to b?'

If your client's can get intel Mac's, then you should be able to get one. If they can't, why do you need to keep supporting intel Mac's?

Keep an Intel Mac around or drop support.

They followed the same path when moving from PPC to Intel.

And 32-bit to 64-bit.

Virtualize macOS 26 for testing purposes: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/01/21/what-can-you-do-with-vir...

> Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on?

In a older version of the OS running in a virtual machine?

That's not going to solve the issue.

You are trying to emulate x86 to test those builds.

Rosetta doesn't emulate x86 hardware, but translates x86 instructions into ARM. The only thing your solution would get you is verification that the Intel build can work on Apple Silicon with Rosetta.

If testing on an Intel Mac is unacceptable, and testing on an ARM Mac using Rosetta is also unacceptable, then there was no reason to complain about Rosetta being deprecated in the first place.

IIRC Apple supported 10.5 extra long because of it being the last PowerPC MacOS. I wouldn't be surprised if they do something similar here. Keep an intel mac around, and you should be fine

> like my Lunar app

Oh hey! Thanks for making this. I've been running this app for a while now, between one and two years. Very much something that I rely on and appreciate.

Continue to upgrade to the latest macOS on your host system, use something that leverages Apple's Virtualized.framework to run any version of macOS you want.

For instance, consider https://tart.run/

All the Android / iOS devs on my team use Tart locally when we need to test mixed environments.

Then we use Tart's sister Cirrus CLI to run our builds on our server.

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.

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.

Oh yeah, I had forgotten about the weird "games" exception. At least that means they'll keep parts of Rosetta 2 around in the code, but they could also end up doing some weird whitelisting for the specific games they want to support and not let anyone else keep using it.

I suspect they're keeping the translator itself around, but not the x86_64 versions of system libraries

No, those need to stay (at least the ones needed to run the targeted "old unmaintained games"). What can go is all the x86_64 slices of system binaries (i.e. bash, perl, etc etc)

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 alternatives are handling it.

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.

Same here. Would be very sad to lose Wine capabilities as well, and presumably these have minimal macOS dependencies.

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.

That's really promising, I expected much worse. Thanks for highlighting!

If Intel virtualization works for Docker, why doesn't it work for things like VMWare or VirtualBox for Intel VM's?

Related? "Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45692116 24-oct-2025 335 comments

This seems less about why it won't be supporting Intel and more about why Rosetta 2 will be going away, which seems mostly related to cleaning up code that is no longer necessary once Intel is not supported.

I bet it must feel good for the macOS engineers to remove the intel support. Probably much easier to do development for the OS as well

As a consumer, I’d like to see the end of “universal” builds for various apps. It made sense for a while but downloading and installing ~60% larger bins just doesn’t make sense 6 years later.

If it's anything like the last time they dropped intel, I wouldn't be surprised if they make sure darwin still builds on x86. Going all arm all the time is good business, but it isn't like apple to not have some kind of fallback

The developer's feelings should not play a role in whether or not to drop support for devices that actual customers bought and use.

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-rosett...

No Apple citation shown for that, though seems plausible.

AFAIK all ways of running docker on MacOS rely on a amd64 virtual machine with Linux kernel in it.

docker --platform linux/arm64 depends on amd64 ?

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

Time to share my little side project... https://hyper-linux.app which I hope will continue to be able to rely on the remnants of rosetta.

This looks great, and possibly useful, but I'm curious, what was the main problem you were trying to solve, or what does this enable for you?

docker is too heavy handed for me. And I’m a long term fan of wine. The primary usecase is Darwin -> Linux cross compilation.

It does supposed xeyes and similar via XQuartz; I gave up trying to make xmms work though. That would have been some fun.

Bad headline. This tweet attempts to explain why Rosetta 2 will no longer work. Which is because the OS no longer supports the Intel platform. That does not explain why the OS does not support the Intel platform.

Because Apple is the King of Deprecations. And they get away with it.

> Because Apple is the King of Deprecations.

Google might wear that particular crown: https://killedbygoogle.com

Apple is the King of Hardware Deprecations. Google is the King of Software Deprecations. You're both right.

They are the Kings of Apple Ecosystem Deprecations - not just hardware. I'm comparing them to the x86 and the Windows ecosystem.

Google is the God-King of Killing software.

But it does?

> Rosetta 2 requires almost the entire OS to have Intel support.

The implication here being that (almost) the entire OS having Intel support is not trivial.

Because it costs them money to maintain it, and they'll make more money when people upgrade to M series?

In all seriousness, it's a little lame. Consider that the Intel Mac Pro (2019 model) was still selling in 2023! That's not that long ago, and those were their highest end machines in terms of memory capacity. The "new" Mac Pro has since been discontinued...

Though buying a Mac Pro in 2023 would be a bit weird. The writing was on the wall. By that point the M1 was almost out for three years and even the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra had been out for a year.

(IMO it stopped making sense buying an Intel Mac after the M1 Air or if your want to be generous the M1 Pro/Max-based MacBook Pros.)

I agree, it is weird, but there were certain workloads (like those needing large memory) that wouldn't run anywhere else. Remember that M1 Ultra, at that time, was limited to 128G of RAM. M2 Ultra brought it to 192G. Intel Mac Pros could take 1.5 TB.

I wonder what the market price of 1.5 TB RAM today would be and if selling that off would pay for the whole Mac Pro :)

But if you wanted to buy an OSX machine with up to 1.5TB of memory, you only had a brief window between when the new Mac Pro was announced and the old Mac Pro was discontinued to snag one before that option went away forever. The M-series Mac Pro only ever supported 192GB.

A bit, but then, it was sold by Apple and some people saw a need for it. Like having tons of memory and of course, being x86-compatible also has its uses. That is, why Rosetta 2 exists. Applying the 7 year support window, they should support it till 2030. Especially, as it was the most expensive hardware sold.

Focusing is about saying no.

— Steve Jobs

https://youtu.be/H8eP99neOVs (WWDC '97)

This is something Microsoft will never learn, it's not in their DNA.

Whatever. We have public utility OS, all the hardware vendors should be forced to provide open-source working drivers after they stop supporting their hardware.

If they are afraid of IP leak, well, they can continue support.

My desktop I built in 2012 is still working running ubuntu, even after Intel & MS decided that it is EOL with the release of windows 11.

Wow and darn I guess last support update to fully depreciate intel MacBooks. Used prices already are cratered.

They are great heavily supported Linux machines though. They work out of the box gorgeously with numerous distros and being usbc is nice. For $100-200 for a mint condition model, it isn’t so bad.

>They are great heavily supported Linux machines though.

Since the release of Touch Bar based Macs (which contain apple silicon) this has not been the case. The Macs that are well supported by linux and work very well were abandoned long time ago.

He explicitly said Intel Macs - which are great Linux machines if you can accept the performance.

Would the M* be much better? Obviously, but that's not (yet) in the cards.

Touch Bar predates Apple Silicon and most AS models do not have a Touch Bar.

The T2 chip is Apple silicon, and marked the beginning of really locking down the OS running on a Mac (as opposed to iOS, which was always locked down that way, and Intel Macs which of course could run anything).

It was the first mass market SoC hardware test of their new Mac chip design and it seems it was also to prep macOS for the M line. The level of control Apple gave it makes repair and refurbishing very difficult without Apple’s authorization.

T2 Overview PDF https://www.apple.com/jp/mac/docs/Apple_T2_Security_Chip_Ove...

That is an interesting point. I did mean the M series, M1 and later, when I said Apple Silicon, and that's usually how I interpret the phrase. The Wikipedia article by the same name seems to interpret it much more broadly, also including mobile stuff like the A series.

Not sure why this is so down voted. I have a touch bar era Intel Mac, I regularly check the state of Linux on it and they are still somewhat poorly supported. Some drivers are out of tree, audio and sleep doesn't necessarily work, etc...

I am missing something ? If I read the link in xcancel.com correctly, it says what I would look at as "intel emulation" will be removed in the next release.

So, it looks to me application vendors who depends upon this emulation was given proper notice of this removal. So I think you should complain to the vendors instead of Apple.

Most times I tend to criticize Apple, but this time seems Apple just moving on to avoid "bloat" and "cruft" from being carried forward in future releases.

OpenBSD does things like this all the time and they get praised for it, which I agree with. Apple did the same with this and some people are upset :)

This sort of thing makes the lack of a downgrade process a real problem. If you rely on something that uses Rosetta, you aren't likely to find out until after you've upgraded, at which point it's too late, you're stuck with it and lose that app. Which means that if you _don't know_ whether you're relying on Rosetta (which most people won't), upgrading is a risky proposition, which people will want to avoid.

Anonymous mirror: https://xcancel.com/Lina_Hoshino/status/2046112493320458649

Because they've invested billions into making their own chips? And those chips have pretty damn good performance/power draw/cooling etc. I think the answer is pretty straightforward.

executive decision

I just want Linux on my T2 mbp.

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, so I could get a big warning if I was about to install something that wouldn’t work in the not too distant future.

Hopefully Sonos will finally get around to it as well.

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.

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 ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com