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Commenters lament that Rosetta will go away before users are ready.

In my opinion, Rosetta should be more heavily gated* to push everyone from Adobe to Steam to build for aarch64. Countless "Apple Silicon native" claiming tools require Rosetta under the hood for dependencies or even (bless their hearts) only their installer.

* Like right-click to open packages or install not-from app store, except Rosetta dialog should note that once it's installed any other old software not made for this system will run without warning. Turns out avoiding Rosetta is a great way to ensure not just apps but your CLI tools are all up to date... Alternatively, make Rosetta sandboxed with apps, and/or let it be turned off again more reasonably than the safe-mode surgery required now.

official support for any macos version < ventura has been dropped (monterey support ended 2024-09-16)

so i wonder whether apple will consider this a bug...

> It seems that M4 chips can’t virtualise any version of macOS before 13.4 Ventura

13.4 was released on May 18, 2023. That's actually not very far into the past.

Anyway, what would be the most common use cases for this? And how common are those?

So, is it assumed as a bug more than a removed feature? If this is a bug and could be fixed I would treat this different to "no more support for older macOSes".

Apple broke the compiler suite on Mac OS X 10.3. As part of a security update they shipped a new version of libstdc++ -- which was built using a different ABI than the compilers for 10.3, and they weren't going to update the compilers for 10.3. (Some sort of GCC ABI flag day happened.)

You could still build programs for 10.3 -- but you needed the latest version of Xcode and the compilers for that, which Apple only shipped for 10.4 and up. So you had to set Xcode for 10.3 compatibility mode and then you could build your app.

If you develop for Apple's platform, you need to be running the latest version, period, end of statement. If you aren't, there's no telling what may break.

A few years ago we added `GOAMD64=v3` [1] to how we build our go binary into docker images, as all our production servers have support to that and that can give us some free performance boost.

Then it turned out Rosetta does not support that, so those docker images can no longer run on developers' mac laptops, so we have to revert it back. This is why we can't have nice things (we don't use any arm server so we never bothered to build multi-platform docker image).

[1]: https://go.dev/wiki/MinimumRequirements#amd64

Macs in CI are an absolute nightmare. For some reason (well, I do have a reason, they want to sell you more Mac Minis) macOS is the only modern OS that has no real container solution builtin. Windows has Docker and true containers, FreeBSD has jails, Linux has a bajillion solutions, Darwin (macOS)? Nothing. They've ripped half of FreeBSD already, just pull jails too!

Come on, Apple. What are you doing? I was thinking just the other day that Apple should virtualize older iPhones within the latest iPhone system software, so you could seamlessly open old apps and games (32-bit, anyone?) in their own containerized environments. I can't think why they haven't added this feature for any reason other than money grubbing.

You could even customize the containers to be completely closed off from the rest of the iPhone—no contacts, no Internet access (or high security Internet access), etc.

Come on, Apple. Do something good for once. Oh and bring back the headphone jack.

-Mark

I miss how the VM are managed, UTM or something else ?

I sure hope this is addressed by a future OS update. I’m not a hardware person, so I can’t imagine why this wouldn’t be possible to address. If someone with more experience in that area can offer theories, I’d love to hear them.

Why do IT professionals keep insisting that their consumer electronics are built with the intention of supporting their professional goals?