Apple may plan to remove support for Rosetta 2 on M1 Macs in certain regions with the release of macOS 11.3, according to code strings discovered in the third beta of the software update.
Code strings discovered in the third beta of macOS 11.3, seeded to developers Tuesday, suggest that Rosetta 2 “will be removed when installing this update.” Another string may indicate that “Rosetta is no longer available in your region. Applications that require Rosetta will no longer work.”
The strings were first spotted by MacRumors employee Steve Moser.
Rosetta 2 is a translation layer that allows Apple Silicon Macs to run apps built for Intel’s x86 architecture. It is part of a suite of features designed to ease the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon processors, a switch that began in 2020 and is expected to take two years.
It’s not clear why Apple would remove Rosetta 2 in some regions, especially since nearly half of all popular macOS apps still needed the translation layer as of February 2021. are cut in that software update.
In addition to the strings referring to Rosetta 2, Moser also discovered code indicating that Apple could add the ability to assign controller buttons to keyboard layouts, among other minor updates.