Apple has confirmed macOS 27 Golden Gate as the last version of macOS to ship with full Rosetta 2 support.
The translation layer has kept Intel-built apps running on Apple silicon Macs since the M1 chip arrived in late 2020. Apple flagged the end date at WWDC 2025, committing to two more major macOS releases after the announcement. Golden Gate fulfills that promise. Starting with macOS 26.4, the system has been alerting users whenever they open an Intel-only app, warning that support will end in a future release. One narrow exception survives: Apple says it will preserve a subset of Rosetta for older, unmaintained gaming titles built on Intel frameworks — everything else is on its own.
The pressure lands hardest on organizations running niche or legacy software that never received a native Apple silicon build. Developers and IT teams have until macOS 28 ships, likely in 2027, to find native replacements, push vendors to build them, or accept being locked to macOS 27 indefinitely. Most mainstream apps made the jump years ago; the pain concentrates in the long tail of enterprise tools, specialized utilities, and abandoned software.
Apple ran the same playbook for the PowerPC-to-Intel switch, closing the Rosetta 1 window in roughly five years. This time it offered closer to seven — either a generous gesture, or a quiet admission that the Intel app tail turned out considerably longer than the company expected.