When do you think Apple will disable universal binaries on Apple Silicon Macs?

[Faize]

Apple has a history of dropping support for anything old, and true to that the phase out of Rosetta is now starting. I imagine that at some point Apple will start requiring ARM-only thin binaries.

 

[Nermal]

As far as I'm aware, you can still run a universal app that contains a 32-bit PowerPC slice. It's one thing to require a new slice, but I don't see Apple actively blocking apps containing old slices.

 

[Bigwaff]

Apple has a history of dropping support for anything old, and true to that the phase out of Rosetta is now starting. I imagine that at some point Apple will start requiring ARM-only thin binaries.

Apple phased out the original Rosetta with Lion in 2011. Original universal binaries still worked after Lion, the PowerPC code was ignored.

Rosetta 2 is supposedly to phased out with macOS 28

Apple to Phase Out Rosetta 2 Starting With macOS 28 as Intel Era Ends

Following its WWDC keynote on Monday, Apple updated a developer document to indicate that Rosetta 2 will remain available through macOS 27. Rosetta 2 enables Macs with Apple silicon (Arm architecture) to run apps that were built for Macs with an Intel processor (x86 architecture), by translating...

www.macrumors.com

As far as binaries go, not sure it will require ARM-only. I imagine, just as with the original Universal binaries, after macOS 28, the Intel code in Universal 2 binaries will simply be ignored.

 

[benwiggy]

They won't stop developers from releasing Universal Binaries; but at some time, Apple will release an OS without any Intel code, and there will be decreasing point for third-party devs to make ARM/Intel binaries.