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by WalterGR 1693 days ago
How good is Rosetta 2 in practice?
5 comments

When I first got my M1 MacBook Air I was still a DropBox paid customer. But when the app started using over half a gigabyte of memory, I took more and more stuff out of it and started putting it on iCloud. I've cancelled my subscription and now have less than my grandfathered free space occupied, with no syncing going on.

I have very few apps that require Rosetta 2. In my experience, it works great, but I can no longer imagine having an app that requires Rosetta running constantly in the background. My MBA is only 8GB, and while that is rarely a problem for me, I can't afford to just fritter it away.

When it works it's fine. But I'm getting bug reports that users have to install or update it manually to run x86 binaries, which is terrible UX for anything that isn't a developer tool.

Don't take this comment as gospel though, I have not had time or resources to investigate what was going on.

That was my first question. Is the dropbox app doing that much in terms of heavy lifting?
It’s very solid in my experience but does have a memory and performance hit. For something like Dropbox which is running constantly in the background that’s not great.
Another important question: how long does Apple plan to support/maintain it?
Apple typically supports the prior architecture via emulation for at least 5 years after they cease sales of that architecture.