They barely just released Containerization Framework[0] and the new container[1] tool, and they are already scheduling a kneecapping of this two years down the line.
Realistically, people are still going to be deploying on x64 platforms for a long time, and given that Apple's whole shtick was to serve "professionals", it's really a shame that they're dropping the ball on developers like this. Their new containerization stuff was the best workflow improvement for me in quite a while.
Apple has always been like this, there are other options when backwards compatibility is relevant feature.
Yeah, it kind of kills me that I am writing this on a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 running Windows 11 so that I can run Macromedia Freehand/MX (I was a beta-tester for that version) so that I can still access Altsys Virtuoso 2 files from my NeXT Cube (Virtuoso 2 ~= Macromedia Freehand 4) for a typeface design project I'm still working on (a digital revival of a hot metal typeface created by my favourite type designer/illustrator who passed in 1991, but whose widow was gracious enough to give me permission to revive).
I was _so_ hopeful when I asked the devs to revive the Nx-UI code so that FH/MX could have been a native "Cocoa" app....
> running Windows 11 so that I can run Macromedia Freehand/MX
Freehand still works on Windows 11? I’m happy for you, I never found a true replacement for it.
> a digital revival of a hot metal typeface created by my favourite type designer/illustrator who passed in 1991, but whose widow was gracious enough to give me permission to revive
Any reason you haven’t shared the name of the designer or the typeface? That story sounds interesting, I’d really welcome learning more.
Yes, fortunately. I despair of what I'm going to do when I no longer have such an option. Cenon is clunky, Inkscape's cross-platform nature keeps it from having many interface aspects which I depend on, and I'd rather give up digital drawing than use Adobe Illustrator (which despite using since v3.2 on college lab Macs and on my NeXT Cube I never found comfortable).
The designer/typeface are Warren Chappell's Trajanus, and his unreleased Eichenauer --- I read _The Living Alphabet_ (and his cousin Oscar Ogg's _The 26 Letters_) when I was very young, and met him briefly on a school field trip back when he was Artist-in-Residence at UVA and did a fair bit of research in their Rare Book Room, and even had a sample of the metal type (missing one character unfortunately).
It is currently stalled at my having scanned and drawn up one of each letter at each size which I have available, but only having two letters, _N_ and _n_ in all sizes --- probably shouldn't worry that much about the optical axis, since it was cut in metal in one master size and the other sizes made using a pantograph, but there were _some_ adjustments which I'd like to preserve. There is a digital version of Trajanus available, but it's based on the phototype. I've been working at recreating each character using METAFONT, encompassing the optical size variation in that programmatically, but it's been slow going (and once I'm done, I then have to work out how to make it into outlines....)
That's why like 80%+(?) of corporate world runs Windows client side for their laptops/workstations. They don't want to have to rewrite their shit whenever the OS vendor pushes an update.
Granted, that's less of an issue now with most new SW being written in JS to run in any browser but old institutions like banks, insurances, industrial, automation, retail chains, etc still run some ancient Java/C#/C++ programs they don't want to, or can't update for reasons but it keeps the lights on.
Which is why I find it adorable when people in this bubble think all those industries will suddenly switch to Macs.
they use Windows because it's ostensibly cheap and there's momentum. I don't think any modern tech company is majority Windows.
One of my previous companies gave top of the line workstations with 4k touchscreens and i9s to literally everyone junior and below a particular grade. I'm quite sure they could've saved 1000s of dollars per laptop by going with a reasonable MacBook.
(Ironically, windows 11 + corporate bloatware made the laptops super laggy. Go figure.)
It surely is outside US, and countries with similar income level.
https://www.accio.com/business/operating-system-market-share...
That's overall market share. Agree Windows use is high but in general the more tech-forward the company is the less Windows there is at it.
So only 13% of the world desktop users might be employeed at a tech-forward company.
Might, because the number is even less, when we differenciate between companies and home use.
> more tech-forward
That may be surprising for people here, but technology is not synonymous with software.
>but in general the more tech-forward the company is the less Windows there is at it. reply
Only if you count food delivery apps, crypto Ponzi scheme unicorns, Ad-services and SaaS start-ups as "tech-forward" exclusively, because you're omitting a lot of other tech companies your daily life in the civilized world depends on, which operate mainly on Windows, like where I work now.
Is designing and building semiconductors not "technology"? Or MRI machines? Or jets? Or car engines?
The whole world does not consist of the tech industry.
The OP says nothing about Rosetta for Linux.
It seems to talk about Rosetta 2 as a whole, which is what the containerization framework depends on to support running amd64 binaries inside Linux VMs (even though the kernel still needs to be arm)
Is there a separate part of Rosetta that is implemented for the VM stuff? I was under the impression Rosetta was some kind of XPC service that would translate executable pages for Hypervisor Framework as they were faulted in, did I just misunderstand how the thing works under the hood? Are there two Rosettas?
I cannot tell you about implementation difference but what I mean is that this only talks about Rosetta 2 for Mac apps. Rosetta for Linux is a feature of the Virtualization framework that’s documented in a completely different place. And this message says a part of Rosetta for macOS will stick around, so I would be surprised if they removed the Linux part.
On the Linux side, Rosetta is an executable that you hook up with binfmt to run AMD64 binaries, like how you might use Wine for windows binaries
Rosetta Linux executable can be used without host hardware/software support; for example, you can run it on AWS's Graviton instances.
However, to get performance benefits, you still need to have hardware support, and have Rosetta installed on macOS [1].
TFA is quite vague about what is being deprecated.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
The "other" part of Rosetta is having all system frameworks being also compiled for x86_64, and being supported running in this configuration.
> and given that Apple's whole shtick was to serve "professionals",
When was the last time this was true? I think I gave up on the platform around the new keyboards, who clearly weren't made for typing, and the non-stop "Upgrade" and "Upgrade" notifications that you couldn't disable, just push forward into the future. Everything they've done since them seems to have been to impress the Average Joe, not for serving professionals.
The current macbook pro was basically a checklist of items professionals wanted away from consumer new shiny thing.
And then they introduced liquid glass, because professionals don't need an easily readable UI to work with.
> Everything they've done since them seems to have been to impress the Average Joe, not for serving professionals.
"CIOs say Apple is now mission critical for the enterprise" [1]
[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/25/cios-say-apple-is-now-mission...
That's literally sponsored content/an ad by a company who makes money managing Apple devices, of course they'll say it's "mission critical", on a website meant to promote Apple hardware.
Happen to have some less biased source saying anything similar, ideally not sponsored content?
There are a lot of projects with arm containers on docker hub. It’s not hard to build multi platform containers.