Except that those situations were materially different from the current situation in two huge ways:
1. The architecture they're migrating away from is the dominant architecture in the market (both now and for the past few decades), meaning that rather than simply losing support for older MacOS software, they'd be losing access to easy virtualization of everything Windows and Linux can do.
2. The architecture they're migrating to is their own, 100% in their control, meaning that they can maintain hardware-level support for this translation layer without needing to convince any other company to put that effort in on each subsequent chip generation.
Now, does this mean they're guaranteed to maintain Rosetta 2 forever? No, of course not. I don't know what Apple's going to do any more than you or viktorcode do.
But it does mean that seeing this transition as being exactly a mirror of the past 2 architecture transitions they did is dangerous, at best.
Agreed that this is a different situation. If they drop Rosetta then Crossover is gone and Game Porting Toolkit is finished. Also Docker will be limited without x86. I'm using that to run SQL Server on Linux on MacOS for work.
1. The architecture they're migrating away from is the dominant architecture in the market (both now and for the past few decades), meaning that rather than simply losing support for older MacOS software, they'd be losing access to easy virtualization of everything Windows and Linux can do.
2. The architecture they're migrating to is their own, 100% in their control, meaning that they can maintain hardware-level support for this translation layer without needing to convince any other company to put that effort in on each subsequent chip generation.
Now, does this mean they're guaranteed to maintain Rosetta 2 forever? No, of course not. I don't know what Apple's going to do any more than you or viktorcode do.
But it does mean that seeing this transition as being exactly a mirror of the past 2 architecture transitions they did is dangerous, at best.