> if i have a 2019 imac (coffee lake) for ios mobile development, how long will i be able to use it for that purpose? i am going to face xcode limitations? will i be able to still push to the app store in the years to come?

Based on appstore accepting only last {#}os SDK (not deployment target). Usually Xcode (and Safari) gets support for the previous OS. meaning,

Xcode 26 min macOS is Sequoia 15.x.

So, Xcode 27 min macOS will be macOS 26.

That gives about 2.5 years for Intel Macs to allow complete AppStore integration.

I guess https://github.com/xtool-org/xtool might become more dominant. iiuc, it also valid to use it on "a Mac" even if it was phased out :)

> After the general Rosetta support ends, Apple will maintain a subset of Rosetta functionality specifically for older unmaintained gaming titles that depend on Intel-based frameworks

I guess Apple Rosetta support will be a mix of interests.

1. Apple currently has interest in getting games on their platform. They even made a debugger tool running on Windows so a game dev could profile/debug from his Windows machine :)

2. Unless Apple will have enough power (meaning they will have leverage over games devs), they won't be able to decide when they completely drop Rosetta2.

3. Most likely that companies with personal connections with key people at Apple would take part in when/if the pull the plug on Rosetta2. I guess big software companies might be able to convince Apple is they'll decide to remove it prematurely.

The interesting questions are:

- When will their toolset drop support for compiling for Intel / x86_64?

- When will they drop Rosetta2?

Compiling/delivering universal binaries is something that as a developer, especially for some markets, you’d like to keep. meaning we try to support older Macs as possible.

For Rosetta2, it might be less needed with all apps transitioned, but for developers using containers, it might be more important to have Intel based containers for a longer period.

While very different, it was already tricky in the past to make Apple silicon (on iPhones as well) perform reasonable.

Ableton engineers already evaluated this in the past: https://github.com/Ableton/AudioPerfLab

While I feel for the complaints about the Apple lack of "feedback assiting" The core issue itself is very tricky. Many years ago, before being an audio developer, I've worked in a Pro Audio PC shop...

And guess what... interrupts, abusive drivers (GPUs included) and Intels SpeedStep, Sleep states, parking cores... all were tricky.

Fast forward, We got asymmetric CPUs, arm64 CPUs and still Intel or AMDs (especially laptops) might need bios tweaks to avoid dropouts/stutters.

But if there's a broken driver by CPU or GPU... good luck reporting that one :)