Classic Not Supported on Intel-Based Macs

Monday, 6 June 2005

I haven’t seen this reported elsewhere, and there hasn’t been any official announcement from Apple, but page 67 of Apple’s Universal Binary Programming Guidelines PDF explicitly states that Classic apps are not supported in the Rosetta emulator that runs PowerPC apps on Intel-powered Macs (emphasis mine):

Rosetta is designed to translate currently shipping applications that run on a PowerPC with a G3 processor and that are built for Mac OS X.

Rosetta does not run the following:

• Applications built for Mac OS 8 or 9
• Code written specifically for AltiVec
• Code that inserts preferences in the System Preferences pane
• Applications that require a G4 or G5 processor
• Applications that depend on one or more kernel extensions
• Kernel extensions
• Bundled Java applications or Java applications with JNI libraries that can’t be translated

I don’t think this is surprising, but it’s certainly the end of the Classic Mac era.

Update: I have confirmed that Apple has no plans for Classic support on Intel-based Macs.