Exactly, I remember getting similar replies - though probably on /. then - when the PPC emulator was removed, there are always some people eager to ridicule the idea and portray it as not being feasible. But it is. It is perfectly doable for a company like Apple with a net worth around $4.87 trillion and would probably take less disk space then the AI models their customers now try to remove because they don't need them. As ridiculous as this may sound to the naysayers, I desire very much for an operating system to keep backwards compatibility forever, it can be done and would be very useful for many people.

I didn't want the PPC emulator removed and I don't want the x86 emulator to be removed either. If that makes me a weirdo, so be it.

Third switch. 68000 series to PPC to Intel to Apple Silicon.

Now that they have stopped supporting Intel-based Macs, I understand the desire to not have to port new code and features to x86-64 to keep legacy apps happy.

That is why Intel-based Mac App support is going away, but Rosetta 2 as infrastructure will remain - a much smaller footprint of system functionality will be addressable by x86-64 code that they can reasonably maintain going forward.

That's actually better than where I thought we would be now - I thought by M6 they would remove the hardware extensions that allow Rosetta 2 function from Apple Silicon.

I think they have a lot more reason to keep it around this time. PowerPC was a dead-end and x86 is most definitely sticking around.