Apple may be planning 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 version of the software update.
Code strings discovered in the third beta of macOS 11.3, which was released to developers on Tuesday, suggest that Rosetta 2 “will be removed after installing this update.” Another string may say that “Rosetta is no longer available in your region. Applications that require Rosetta will no longer be run.”
The strings were the first spotted by MacRumors contributor Steve Moser.
Rosetta 2 is a translation layer that allows Apple’s Silicon Macs to run applications developed for Intel’s x86 architecture. It is part of a set of features designed to smooth the transition from Intel processors to Apple Silicon processors, a change that began in 2020 and is expected to take two years.
It is not clear why Apple would remove Rosetta 2 in some regions, especially since almost half of all popular macOS applications still needed the translation layer in February 2021. However, the code strings in macOS 11.3 do not necessarily indicate that support will be cut off in this software update.
In addition to the strings referring to Rosetta 2, Moser also discovered code indicating that Apple could add the ability to map controller buttons to keyboard layouts, along with other minor updates.