M4 Macs can't virtualise older macOS

Come on, Apple. What are you doing? I was thinking just the other day that Apple should virtualize older iPhones within the latest iPhone system software, so you could seamlessly open old apps and games (32-bit, anyone?) in their own containerized environments. I can't think why they haven't added this feature for any reason other than money grubbing.

You could even customize the containers to be completely closed off from the rest of the iPhone—no contacts, no Internet access (or high security Internet access), etc.

Come on, Apple. Do something good for once. Oh and bring back the headphone jack.

-Mark

32bit ARM and aarch64 are wildly different instruction sets. 32bit ARM may as well be x86 or MIPS as far as running it on aarch64 hardware, it is going to require just about the same level of emulation(memory models may be similar which would help, but that's about it).

Unlike x86/64, the 32bit silicon is entirely gone in most aarch64.

I wonder why Intel and AMD still keep the 32 bit and even 16 bit parts. Are there people still running many legacy apps?

On windows, a lot of installers are 32-bit even if the application they're installing is 64-bit so that they can fail gracefully on 32-bit OSes.