MacOS 27 Ends Rosetta 2 Support, Intel Apps Stop Working in 28

Apple spent five years telling developers the clock was ticking. With macOS 27 Golden Gate now in beta, the clock has nearly stopped. When macOS 28 ships, Intel-compiled apps will simply stop launching on Apple silicon Macs, and the Intel Mac era closes for good.

Rosetta 2 arrived in late 2020 alongside the M1 chip, and Apple was explicit from the start that it was a transition tool, not a permanent fixture. At WWDC 2025, the company confirmed the exact cutoff: full Rosetta support runs through macOS 27, after which only a narrow slice of functionality survives to cover older, unmaintained games that depend on Intel-based frameworks. Everything else stops.

The practical pressure falls hardest on organizations running legacy enterprise or specialty software that never received a native Apple silicon build. Those teams face a clear choice: push vendors for updated binaries before macOS 28 ships, find replacements, or freeze on macOS 27 indefinitely. Most consumer-facing apps have had native builds for years, so the blast radius is narrower than it might sound.

One Detail Worth Catching

Golden Gate automatically uninstalls Rosetta 2 if it was present during an upgrade from macOS 26 Tahoe, which means users who still need it must manually reinstall. Apple has also added in-app system alerts in macOS 26.4 and 26.5 that fire whenever an Intel-only app launches, a nudge aimed at both end users and the developers who may not realize anyone still runs their old binary.

The developer beta is live now, with a public beta expected next month and a full release targeting September. Golden Gate is also the first macOS release that drops Intel hardware entirely from the supported list, so the Rosetta cutoff and the hardware cutoff land in the same release. The new interaction patterns arriving in Golden Gate signal how completely Apple is designing for its own silicon going forward.