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Comment by wtallis

3 months ago

Why do you assume that dropping support for Intel hardware from the OS will coincide with dropping hardware features that help support for x86 applications? Have you not seen Apple's documentation that states they plan to retain some Rosetta functionality beyond macOS 27 for the sake of x86 games?

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wtallis

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dangus  3 months ago

I think that documentation essentially demonstrates how Apple wants to put as little resources into it as possible without making users of popular applications mad.

They might even decide that they will be moving that functionality to software and decide to also leverage FEX.

I think that Apple’s overall mentality has traditionally been that they provide enough time for developers to transition applications but that they are not interested in maintaining support for unmaintained apps. That seems to be a very clear pattern of behavior.

  • wtallis  3 months ago

    > They might even decide that they will be moving that functionality to software and decide to also leverage FEX.

    That's crazy. Modifying an already-working CPU design to remove hardware features, and modifying Rosetta to implement that capability in software instead, or wholly replacing Rosetta with FEX, would all require investing more resources and effort than continuing to ship what's already done and working.

    > I think that Apple’s overall mentality has traditionally been that they provide enough time for developers to transition applications but that they are not interested in maintaining support for unmaintained apps. That seems to be a very clear pattern of behavior.

    Fair enough, but we don't actually have to make projections based on past patterns of behavior when Apple has explicitly shared their plans. They do plan to maintain support for unmaintained games.

    I think the only reasonable way to interpret what Apple has said about their plans for Rosetta is to assume they're not likely to muck about with the low-level details of how they handle running x86 machine code, but they are likely to start dropping some x86 libraries from the OS, breaking applications that depend on them. We can reasonably expect that they're retain all the pieces necessary for running x86 Windows software (especially games) under Wine. (Keep in mind that Apple's approach is to not mix x86 and Arm code in the same process; they didn't do anything like Microsoft's Arm64EC.)