Windows 95 was released... well, in 1995. In 2025 you can run apps targeting W95 just fine (and many 16-bit apps with some effort)
Windows 95 was released... well, in 1995. In 2025 you can run apps targeting W95 just fine (and many 16-bit apps with some effort)
> In 2025 you can run apps targeting W95 just fine (and many 16-bit apps with some effort)
FWIW, Windows running on a 64-bit host no longer runs 16-bit binaries.
Yes. Still, there are ways to do it anyway, from Dosbox to WineVDM. Unlike MacOS where having even 32 bit app (e.g. half of Steam games that supported Macos to begin with) means you're fucked
You can use dosbox and x86 virtual machines just fine in macOS (with the expected performance loss) right now, without Rosetta. macOS is still Turing complete.
Technically speaking, you can run anything on anything since stuff Turing complete. Practically speaking however....
E.g. i have half of macos games in my steam library as a 32-bit mac binaries. I don't know a way to launch them at any reasonable speed. Best way to do it is to ditch macos version altogether and emulate win32 version of the game (witch will run at reasonable speed via wine forks). Somehow Win32 api is THE most stable ABI layer for linux & mac
> my steam library as a 32-bit mac binaries. I don't know a way to launch them at any reasonable speed.
To be fair, it's the emulation of x86-32 with the new ARM64 architecture that causes the speed problems. That transition is also why MacBooks are the best portables, in terms of efficiency, that you can buy right now.
All ARM chips have crippled x86-32 performance, because they're not x86-32 chips. You'll find the same (generally worse) performance issues trying to run ARM64 code with x86-64.
Rosetta 2 is pretty good at running x86-32. There's more registers on the destination, after all.
>Windows running on a 64-bit host no longer runs 16-bit binaries.
Which isn't an issue since Windows 95 was not a 16-bit OS, that was MS-DOS. For 16-bit DOS apps there's virtualization things like DOSbox or even HW emulators.
This isn't a new or unique move; Apple has never prioritized backwards compatibility.
If you're a Mac user, you expect this sort of thing. If running neglected software is critical to you, you run Windows or you keep your old Macs around.
It's a bizarre assumption that this is about "neglected software."
A lot of software is for x64 only.
If Rosetta2 goes away, Parallels support for x64 binaries in VMs likely goes away too. Parallels is not neglected software. The x64 software you'd want to run on Parallels are not neglected software.
This is a short-sighted move. It's also completely unprecedented; Apple has dropped support for previous architectures and runtimes before, but never when the architecture or runtime was the de facto standard.
https://docs.parallels.com/parallels-desktop-developers-guid...
Paralles x86_64 emulation doesn't depend on Rosetta.
> If Rosetta2 goes away, Parallels support for x64 VMs likely goes away too.
Rosetta 2 never supported emulating a full VM, only individual applications.
You're right. It looks like the new full VM emulation in 20.2 doesn't use Rosetta.
https://www.parallels.com/blogs/parallels-desktop-20-2-0/
Nevertheless, running x64 software including Docker containers on aarch64 VMs does use Rosetta. There's still a significant valid use case that has nothing to do with neglected software.
Edited my post above. Thanks for the correction.
The OP only applies to Rosetta for running x64 Mac apps, not running x64 Linux software in aarch64 Linux VMs.
I seem to remember 68k software working (on PowerPC Macs) until Classic was killed off in Leopard? I'm likely misremembering the length of time, but it seems like that was the longest backwards-compatibility streak Apple had.
There's a lot of Win95 software that you can't run too. Microsoft puts a lot of work into their extensive backlog of working software. It's not just "good engineering" it's honest to god fresh development.
Just because Microsoft does one thing doesn't mean Apple has to do the same.
That's not a good thing for other reasons; e.g. there are a lot of inconsistencies in modern Windows, like pieces of Windows 3.1 still in Windows 11.
There are leftovers from older versions of macOS and severely neglected apps in Tahoe too. Sure, they might have been given a new icon, or adopted the new system styling, but they have not been updated for ages.
That's not necessarily a good thing.