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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

> they can’t wait to get rid of it

Apple developed the 68k emulator used in PowerPC Macs in-house, and never removed it.

Apple licensed Rosetta from Transitive at a time when they didn't have tens of Billions of dollars in cash lying around.

Rosetta 2 was developed in-house, but even if they were still paying a licensing fee every time they shipped a new OS version, it wouldn't even be a rounding error to their bottom line today.

Why would they be in any rush to remove Rosetta 2 at all?

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Apple could not remove the 68K emulator from the Classic Mac OS, because the Classic Mac OS was never fully ported to PowerPC.

Indeed. I recall reading, in the end, that some 90+% of the code had been converted shortly before OS X became the mainstay.

10.5 dropped Classic but continued to support PowerPC. 32-bit was also dropped at some point. Rosetta 2 will be deprecated one day.

Rosetta 2 could serve as a crutch for developers that don't want to expend the time and effort updating their apps to native ARM compiles. As such, those apps will perform more poorly than they would otherwise. Of course, that needs to be balanced against the potential lack of that app entirely if Rosetta 2 is removed. Looking back, Apple seems to lean towards the more harsh scenario. I am guessing it will be removed some time distant in the future.

The claim being made is that Apple will remove Rosetta 2 in the near future and that "they can't wait to get rid of it", which has no basis in reality.

> Why would they be in any rush to remove Rosetta 2 at all?

Due to the belief that any backwards compatibility comes at the cost of a higher difficulty moving forwards, I suppose.

There will probably come a time in which a new feature will collide with this compatibility layer and I have little doubt that the compatibility layer will lose.

Why is Apple cramming advertising into every first party application they have when they are insanely profitable? They'll drop Rosetta 2 as soon as they are off Intel to not have to pay for staff to maintain it.

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