These features are enabled by default, and in the case of iOS/macOS, desktop Chrome, probably also Copilot+ PCs, download 4 - 7 GB local models without properly explaining this to users. This doesn’t confirm any demand because if you just don’t use the features and don’t fill up your device, you may never notice.

I think this API is probably fine, but only if the user already has a model downloaded and wants these features. Naturally, case in point, Chrome quietly downloads Gemini Nano without any opt-out except through group policy. Things like this and Microsoft’s recent admission that they’ve overindexed on Copilot features in Windows make it increasingly difficult to trust that users actually want more than a few killer AI features, most of which are just ChatGPT.

Anecdotally, non-technical friends and family members know about ChatGPT and increasingly Gemini, get frustrated by Copilot, and don’t know Apple Intelligence exists.

https://superuser.com/questions/1930445/can-i-delete-the-chr...

The official statement from Apple (emailed to developers 10 days ago) is that macOS 27 is the “final release to support Rosetta”, so the title is a bit off.

They also say:

> Please note that Rosetta functionality for older, unmaintained gaming titles that rely on Intel-based frameworks will continue to be supported.

I interpret that to mean just enough of Rosetta and Intel frameworks will continue to be around, at least for macOS 28. Not specified which ones, or whether it stays any longer than that.

I’m pretty curious of what that will look like exactly, because there’s a fair amount of system frameworks/libraries needed to get to a bare minimum “hello world” AppKit app. Add on top any number of other frameworks that might be used by “older, unmaintained” games that Apple sees fit to keep supporting. Does this ensure OpenGL is kept on life support? Will they consider Wine important enough to support, perhaps even after they drop native Intel games?

Apple seems to slightly care about supporting Codeweavers/CrossOver from things I've seen, which indirectly makes Wine, Rosetta 2, and GPTK "important enough to support" since they're important features

I wonder if Apple cares about docker/podman which uses rosetta on amd64 images

I read that as "Rosetta2 for 32 bit" will still be around, somehow.

To my knowledge, PayPal does not hold funds “forever”. They penalise the account holder by locking it away for 180 days. At that point, they can withdraw the balance to a bank account. I have multiple friends and clients who had this happen to them, but in all cases, they were exposed to higher risk by accepting payments through donation forms, or a marketplace where they sell directly to customers. (Despite what feels like an anecdotal high failure rate, somehow I’ve never had an issue running my own marketplace for the past decade.)

Legacy Update is my project, appreciate the thoughts. I’ll look at both. OpenCollective would be a great idea going forward for better transparency, as much as it requires more paperwork.

I do consolidate most of the expenses with my other projects, and ads cover most of the costs, but we’re planning some future projects such as hosting of custom Windows updates (opt-in) that will get expensive. So this will matter a lot more soon enough.

Thanks for spreading the word John, it means a lot. In my teen years I discovered PortableApps and would read through the forum threads, fascinated by the ways the community tricked apps into being portable. Another incredible resource, and I really respect that it’s stayed around so long.

It’s hard to teach people it’s worth their time to double-check these things of course, but I try to show a chain of trust:

1. Files come from Wayback Machine, which is trusted to serve legitimate snapshots

2. There is a sha1 and size listed for most files (though these come from Wayback)

3. Checking signature is easy enough from Explorer

Perhaps a page on “how to know this is legit” is a good idea to help educate about this. The goal of the project is to have legitimate downloads with good SEO, without having to cut through ads/spam/sketchy redirects (still has a few ads but intentionally non-obtrusive), so people aren’t blindly downloading from sketchy sites.

Our data for 2020 comes from this. (The remainder comes from other snapshots on Wayback Machine from various times)

> Then, how could native apps have much better performance on the same hardware, on both Android and iOS?

Web engines were honestly not great back then. WebKit was ok but JavaScriptCore was very slow, and of course that’s what iOS, Android, and BB10 were all running on that slow hardware. I have distinct (bad) memories that even “GPU-accelerated” CSS animations were barely 15fps, while native apps reliably got 60fps unless they really messed up. That’s on top of the infamous 300ms issue, where every tap took 300ms to fire off because it was waiting to see if you were trying to double-tap.

So I really think some of the blame is still shared with Apple, although it’s hard to say if that’s because of any malicious intent to prop up the App Store, or just because they were under pressure to build out the iOS platform that there wasn’t enough time to optimise. I suspect it was both.

Note: A Microsoft account isn’t required to download free apps from the Store, it works fully without extra prompts on a local account. (I like that it works this way, because it means you can install Firefox on a fresh install of Windows without even once opening Edge.)

Microsoft has also implemented a package manager since a few years ago, winget, so now you can

  winget install -e --id Mozilla.Firefox

No - one dev evangelist accidentally diverged from the marketing language for Windows 10, and now his words in a conference talk nobody previously cared about are being used as “proof” Microsoft lied. It’s like if Bob from accounting accidentally mentioned future plans on his LinkedIn years ago, then years later it’s being used as proof of the company going back on their words, despite them issuing a statement back then distancing from it. At some point, someone in a big company will say the wrong thing out loud and it needs to be carefully retracted without confirming or denying future plans.