this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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Uh, no. What they did is make sure x86 software still works perfectly. And not just Mac software - you can run x86 Linux server software on a Mac with Docker, and you can run DirectX x86 PC games on a Mac with WINE. Those third party projects didn't do it on their own, Apple made extensive contributions to those projects.
I'd like to go into more detail but as a third party developer (not for any of the projects I mentioned above) I signed an NDA with Apple relating to the transition process before you could even buy an ARM powered Mac. Suffice to say the fruit company helped developers far and wide with the transition.
And yes, they wanted developers to port software over to run natively, but that was step 2 of the transition. Step 1 was (and still is) making sure software doesn't actually need to be ported at all. Apple has done major architecture switches like this several times and are very good at them. This was by far the most difficult transition Apple has ever done but it was also the smoothest one.
It's 2024, and I still have software running on my Mac that hasn't been ported. If that software is slow, I can't tell. It's certainly not buggy.
Only real issues that I've seen lately are upstream with QEMU, which will probably be sorted soon, if they're not already. I'm absolutely amazed at how well they implemented the x86_64 compatibility.
If found that a few open source apps that are stubbornly Intel only binaries can be compiled as universal apps in Xcode. For example OpenEmu.
Any issues running those with Rosetta? I run x86 VMs regularly without issue.
It was about 50/50, but fortunately everything that didn’t work had upgrades to universal or Apple silicon available. I imagine things were rougher for the early adopters. What surprised me the most was being able to run Windows Steam via Whisky with very little drama.
That honestly surprises me too but I don't use Macs for games.
Me neither, I use it for work and don’t need the distraction but I was curious to see how it performed. It’s impressive how far apps like Wine have come in the last few years.