x86 gaming and running x86 Linux software are the exceptions.
> Starting with macOS 28, Rosetta 2 will be largely discontinued. Apple says that after that point, it “will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.”
What they say is "we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks" which sounds like OS X games. But even if it is all-inclusive "retro" games, that means the 1,000s of contemporary games runnable via Crossover through Steam for Windows are being shut out.
They relented under pressure to continue allowing Linux virtual machines, so hopefully they continue to revisit this decision.
Given that they could have easily get Steam Deck levels of compatibility with Windows games, but didn’t, I think they’re mainly after the App Store margins for ported games. Having an independent marketplace with tons of Mac-compatible games is a nightmare for them.
Gambling apps. Extremely few of the "games" on App Store are traditional games. Most of them are lootbox puzzle slop because that's what Apple tolerates && most lucrative.
If I'm not mistaken, to keep native titles running, they need to continue to haul around x86 versions of the majority of the system's libraries and frameworks, in which case there's little reason to not continue supporting Rosetta 2 as a whole since the delta between the two library/framework sets is minimal.
To keep games in WINE/CrossOver/etc working all they need to keep around is the x86 translation layer and maybe the x86 slice of OpenGL. Everything else x86 related can be deleted.
Dosbox has its emulator to run DOS, but afaik dosbox binary that starts up dosbox on Mac uses Rosetta on M-series Macs, and without Rosetta it simply won’t start and emulate DOS.
At least the ARM-based binary of DosBox-X (a variant of DosBox) runs natively and works great for everything I've thrown at it like old Apogee games, etc.
I get why Apple wants to remove it but it genuinely sucks. I can't imagine it costs them a lot to put it into maintenance mode and just support 20 years of macOS games and apps going forward. They want developers to fully move to ARM but older titles or software whose developers have moved on/passed will be lost to the sands of time.
If they choose to discontinue it, it would be nice to have them opensource it so that the community could have a go at maintaining it tbh. Surely that's better than letting it rot (both rosetta and the old software that it runs).
That would be ideal, but given Apple's general hostility towards Open Source, it sounds extremely unlikely. I wonder what it would take to re-implement it. If it's "just software," I suppose there is a chance, not that I'm volunteering :)
Apple really isn't as hostile towards OSS as people think. With that being said, the reason to discontinue Rosetta 2 is to push developers to upgrade their software. Allowing others to continue using Rosetta 2 by way of 3rd party maintainers works against that goal :(
Rosetta 2 is software, but there are design decisions made for the M-series chips that are specifically made to improve the ability of Rosetta to work in a performant way. The main one I'm aware of is the x86-TSO memory-ordering mode - most ARM chips don't support this, but the M-series have it so that Rosetta can toggle it on for x86 emulation.
I'm not sure what the total cost of these are, but it's not zero.
> There are only a handful of different instructions that account for 90% of all operations executed, and, near the top of that list are addition and subtraction. On ARM these can optionally set the four-bit NZCV register, whereas on x86 these always set six flag bits: CF, ZF, SF and OF (which correspond well-enough to NZCV), as well as PF (the parity flag) and AF (the adjust flag).
> Emulating the last two in software is possible (and seems to be supported by Rosetta 2 for Linux), but can be rather expensive. Most software won’t notice if you get these wrong, but some software will. The Apple M1 has an undocumented extension that, when enabled, ensures instructions like ADDS, SUBS and CMP compute PF and AF and store them as bits 26 and 27 of NZCV respectively, providing accurate emulation with no performance penalty.
There's another big one, 4K page support. The MMU can be told to set up a virtual address space with smaller, x86-compatible 4096-byte memory pages instead of the default 16384-byte pages.
This would be very bad for Wine too. I think Wine has some answer to this, since Wine does run on Android, but I think it won’t make the current easy path that is just brew install wine and be done.
> Starting with macOS 28, Rosetta 2 will be largely discontinued. Apple says that after that point, it “will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.”
https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/16/macos-26-4-will-notify-users-...
It's the Mac native x86 software that hasn't been updated in most of a decade that would be affected.