I'm surprised that Rosetta 2 isn't installed by default. It seems that for the next couple of years the vast majority of people will need at least one x86 app.
I guess split-architecture applications were also not foreseen as it is clear that the auto-install prompt doesn't work very well in that case.
Feels like a bit of a nudge to developers to not take x86 compatibility for a given… kind of, "it's there if it's truly necessary, but you really should port that plugin/daemon/etc".
This is correct if you refer to how early versions of the Mac OS X installer was packaged. The Classic environment framework was always installed but a copy of Mac OS 9 was also required to be installed on the system volume as well—and this wasn't included when installing a fresh copy of Mac OS X from a CD.
There was a limited period of time when Apple shipped and installed both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X on Macs—so for those people, the Classic environment was "effectively" installed by default. Though to reproduce this you'd need to run the Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 installers from their respective CDs.
Given the sibling comment "It's even worse. It's uninstalled when upgrading macOS." does it also give a way of monitoring emulation usage without violating privacy too much?
"X% of machines have installed Rosetta on this version of MacOS" would be a useful number without measuring the specific executions.
It should be expected that during this transition, everyone will have one x86 app or another. An upgrade breaking nearly 100% of users is a laughed-out-the-door bad user experience.
It essentially works only when launching apps from the Finder or the dock (not when app A launches app B, except if it did something about it, but that's unlikely) and brings up a prompt window. The opposite of silent.
I wonder if it has anything to do with licensing costs of everything that went into Rosetta? I imagine they owe someone royalties and licensing costs on some components in it, saves some pennies to dollars to only install it as needed
I guess split-architecture applications were also not foreseen as it is clear that the auto-install prompt doesn't work very well in that case.