Quicken Classic for Mac & Rosetta 2 support discontinuation late 2027

Tim3

Will Quicken Classic for Mac be affected by Rosetta 2 discontinuation expected at the end of 2027? If so, can Quicken comment if they are working with developers to transition the software to run native on Apple silicon?

jacobs

@Tim3 Quicken Mac runs natively on Apple silicon (M-series) Macs — and has since the first M1 Macs were released in 2020. You can see this by clicking Get Info on the Quicken.app; it shows it's a "Universal" application, meaning it runs natively on M-series Macs and also has code to run under Rosetta 2 on Intel Macs:

Or you can look in Activity Monitor and see that Kind=Apple, which means it is running natively:

So the only issue is that when macOS 28 is released (in late fall 2027), it will not run on Intel-based Macs. If you continue to run macOS 27 or earlier, then your Intel Mac will continue to run, and it will continue to run apps (like Quicken) which utilize Rosetta 2 in order to run. If you have an M-series Mac from 2020 or later, then Quicken will run natively, as it does today.

Jon

@jacobs Just to clarify, Universal apps run natively on Intel as well as M series processors; they have both sets of executables embedded in the application, so Rosetta 2 is not used at all for such apps (unless you check the "Open in Rosetta" box in Get Info to force it). And as far as I know, Rosetta 2 would not allow Intel Macs to run Apple Silicon code, it only allows Apple Silicon Macs to run Intel code.

As long as Quicken continues to be a Universal app it will still run on Intel Macs, but at some point Apple will remove support for Universal apps from Xcode & it will only generate Apple Silicon apps, and the days of Quicken Mac on Intel will come to an end. I don't know if that will happen at the same time that Apple drops Intel from Mac OS, though - I don't think Apple has said anything specifically about Xcode yet.

jacobs

Yes, sorry I sort of blurred two separate issues because the original post did. Apple is significantly reducing Rosetta 2 in macOS 28; it will retain limited support for legacy apps like old games that won't be updated again.

But as you note, @Jon, the future of Rosetta 2 is not relevant to Quicken Mac, because Quicken runs natively on Intel and M-series Macs. I should have stopped after my first sentence in answering @Tim3: Quicken Mac runs natively on Apple silicon Macs, period. 😀