My understanding is that that line only refers to VM applications written and compiled for x86, and doesn't stop a VirtualBox (or any other VM provider) from compiling an ARM binary that doesn't require Rosetta.

I don't think this is a policy restriction so much as there not being support for Intel virtualisation technologies that that might rely on.

Think this is accurate. Any modern x86 virtualization software depends on hypervisor assistance from Intel/AMD to run at reasonable speeds, and that's just virtualizing x86 on x86--more like a context shift between sandboxes. Full virtualization through a CPU emulator to boot isn't very likely to be practical anytime soon.

I suspect they'll treat it as a policy restriction, though, so they wouldn't have to deal with emulator compatibility going forward. Any solution that would be even minimally able to support virtualizing x86 would probably be ugly to keep running. If VMW or Parallels gets something going, my guess is they'll have to work through Apple to get an exception.

That line just means you can’t run an emulator on top of an emulator, which makes sense. Performance would suck.

What will happen instead is that companies like VMware will release emulators that run natively on Apple chips. (Rather than trying to run on top of Rosetta.) However, Intel Windows performance might still suck in those. Remains to be seen.

> companies like VMware will release emulators that run natively on Apple chips

Exactly. This has happened before e.g. Microsoft's VirtualPC [0].

> However, Intel Windows performance might still suck in those

Bingo. I remember how agonisingly slow VirtualPC was for anything remotely useful (forget gaming).

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20071031005603/http://www.micros...

Maybe with this growing interest in ARM desktops someone could consider continuing that project that was going around a few years ago of integrating QEMU and WINE. Some old x86 Win32 apps would probably run fine under, like they do on Microsoft's emulator.

Tim Cook says new Intel Macs are coming out this year. If you can convince your company to buy you one, you should be good until 2030.

Not being able to do your job would be enough for even my craptastic company to buy me a new machine.

2030 is a stretch. Apple has generally supported new Mac hardware for 5-7 years, and my guess is the timeline is only going to get shorter for Intel-based Macs going forward, considering their resources are going to be disproportionately allocated to the newer versions.

First Intel Macs were released in January 2006 and OS X dropped support for Power PC in August 2009 with 10.6 Snow Leopard. If the same timeline is followed here, Intel support will be dropped around 2024. I wouldn't expect to get 10 years out of an Intel Mac.

It will be at least several years before you will not be able to purchase a new Intel-based Mac.

From another article, Apple claims that the transition will be complete in two years. I have 2.5 years left before I will be eligible to have my work computer replaced.

Depending on the exact timing of Apple's product cycles and the procurement cycle, I'll either be getting one of the last Intel Macs or a Windows machine of some description.

If an Intel Mac is still available at this time, that brings other concerns - in particular, Macs are on a five-year replacement cycle at my work, so even if they are available it may not be prudent to buy one. Will it get new MacOS versions for its 5-year lifetime? Will it still get security updates five years down the road? Will the developers of the applications I use still ship x86_64 versions of their Mac applications?

Because of all of that uncertainty, it may end up being a better option to just get a Windows machine when I'm eligible. Fortunately, a lot of that uncertainty should be cleared up by the time that happens.

EDIT: Another remote possibility is that VMware figures out some way to fill in the gaps that Rosetta doesn't. After all, they did figure out how to do virtualization on a platform that didn't even support it.

I think this may largely be a non-issue by the time it rolls around, as while software emulation of x86_64 might prove tricky, there's one thing that runs x86_64 really well. Actual x86_64 chips.

This is what they used way back in the day. Apple (and others) actually made x86 (non-64) add-on cards for PPC Macs that were effectively PCs on a card to slap in a Mac.

Would be relatively trivial to do the same now. PC on a PCIe card, maybe expose itself to the host as just a high speed network card.

Use a Ryzen embedded chip, SO-DIMMS, job's a good-un.

All the major software stuff would already work. Headless diskless iSCSI PC.

Bonus feature that it also acts as a hardware dongle if you want some magic sauce MacOS software to make the process easier.

> There is a very remote possibility that Windows for ARM could be virtualized by some future version of VMware and the proprietary toolset could run under that, but I'm not holding my breath.

How is that remote? We've already seen Parallels Desktop virtualize Linux for ARM.

As far as I can tell, you can't buy Windows for ARM, you can only get a license by buying specific hardware.

Aside from that, most people who want Windows support on a Mac want support for x86 Windows, not the ARM version. So even if it does run, it's likely to be a hobbyist/ hacker thing, not a product.

Windows for ARM has a built-in emulator for x86 binaries, so I think most users trying to run random legacy programs would be satisfied with it. (Gamers, not so much…)

Sounds like there will be Intel Macs for at least a few years coming so it's likely you'll have some time before you have to worry about it. By the time Apple quits shipping Intel Macs it may be a non-issue.

> Currently I run it in VMware Fusion

That’s how you’d do it on an ARM Mac too.

Rosetta is about executing Mac apps on ARM Macs. For Windows apps you’re still going to go to a third party, most likely the same third-parties as before.

It will be very slow to emulate a Windows x86 kernel on ARM.

I have a very similar situation: I loved using MacBook Pros as my work computer for over 10 years now, but while my job consists of 80% of cross-platform Java development stuff, it also includes working on and compiling various custom binaries (from big fat Chromium builds down to little system-level libraries and Linux kernel modules). All three major OSes are targets: MacOS, but most importantly Windows and Linux - especially Linux, because that's the main production environment on which our end products usually run, while the others are mostly needed to enable our devs to develop on their preferred platforms.

Windows and Linux MUST be x86_64, because that stuff needs to run on that arch eventually - it's of no use if it "works on my (ARM) machine". The Mac platform has, until now, been the ideal platform for my work, because it comes with by far the best OS on which I can be as productive as possible, while at the same time being able to execute all three targets within performant VM environments, greatly simplifying all the low-level development tasks as well as testing and experimentation. Even USB hardware could transparently be routed into the VMs - something that's also very important for me, as I often need to deal with weird and rather unusual periphery, and which is highly problematic when working on remotely hosted VMs, which I did try for a while back then when MacBooks had that RAM cap at 16GB in order to be able to utilize more memory.

I'm still good with my current MacBook Pro for about two years or so, which gets me well into the transition period. I know that I'll definitely be tempted to privately buy a replacement for an old 2011 MacBook Air, which I still use for light browsing tasks and stuff at home and which will be totally fine if it's ARM-based. If anyone happens to come around with some kind of VM emulation solution for actually virtualizing x86_64 OSes on the ARM-based Macs - there at least seems to be a demand, so I haven't lost hope that one of the likes of Parallels or VMware might take up that task - I'm going to give that a try and see whether it's a solution to my remaining 20%.

If that doesn't work out, I'll have to consider either switching to ARM Mac regardless and keeping the old machine (or another PC laptop or something) around as a second machine for the low-level Windows/Linux work, or ditching the Mac platform and moving to a Linux-based machine as my main computer, with Windows in a VM, and maybe getting a small ARM Mac as a "sidekick" for that bit of MacOS compilation and testing work. Either of those will be worse than my current, nearly-perfect setup, which was originally enabled only by the beauty of ISA compatibility between the Mac and PC platforms.