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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

Anyone that used an iOS simulator back in the x64 days would tell you that it’s entirely possible to run iOS on x64, just Apple chooses not to do it.

(before anyone jumps in to tell me the simulator is not a full OS: I know. But there was a full toolchain to build for x64, if they’d chosen to Apple could have leveraged it)

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the os isn't the hard part, its the app ecosystem and navigating how do you ensure they all run properly on x86, and not with a huge performance or battery hit. i would be rosetta2 in reverse, and as great as rosetta2 is it has limitations & does come at a cost.

sharing the cpu arch makes things easy, case in point at launch m1 ran ios apps.

> how do you ensure they all run properly on x86

Again, simulator builds in Xcode are exactly that on x64 devices.

> it would be rosetta2 in reverse

It wouldn’t. Rosetta takes programs compiled for one CPU and runs them on another. But in this scenario apps would be built specifically for x64. Xcode previously had the ability to build multiple architectures in one package (32bit and 64bit), they could totally package ARM and x64 together if they wished to.

You seem to be forgetting that every app in the App Store would need to be rebuilt.. and developers would need to buy in and do so

Make it a requirement in order to ship a new version, developers would do it in an instant. Just like they did with 64bit builds.

Sure, a small number of apps would fall to the wayside. But it’s not like Apple has hesitated to do that before.

I think you are grossly underestimating the number of apps that no longer see regular updates/have active developers

I think you’re grossly overestimating how many of those apps are actually used regularly. Even if Apple only got 15% of the entire App Store available on x64 it would fulfill the needs of almost all users.

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