Apple may be planning to remove support for Rosetta 2 on Macs M1 in certain regions with the release of macOS 11.3, according to the code strings uncovered in the third beta of the software update.
The code strings discovered in the third beta version of macOS 11.3, which were released to developers on Tuesday, suggest that Rosetta 2 “will be removed by installing this update.” Another string may indicate that “Rosetta is no longer available in your region. Applications that require Rosetta will no longer run.”
The strings were the first seen by MacRumors collaborator Steve Moser.
Rosetta 2 is a translation layer that allows Apple Silicon Macs to run applications designed for Intel’s x86 architecture. It is part of a set of features designed to smooth the transition from Intel processors to Apple Silicon, a switch that was launched in 2020 and is expected to take two years.
It’s unclear why Apple would remove Rosetta 2 in some regions, mostly because nearly half of popular macOS applications still needed the translation layer as of February 2021. However, macOS 11.3 code strings don’t necessarily indicate that support will be trimmed in this software update.
In addition to the strings referring to Rosetta 2, Moser also discovered a code indicating that Apple could add the ability to map controller buttons to keyboard layouts, along with other minor updates.