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

For better or worse it's never been Apples MO to keep software working forever, that's Microsoft's schtick. PPC OSX software is gone, x86-32 OSX software is gone even on hardware that could still run it natively, AArch32 iOS software is gone, and if history is any indication it's only a matter of time before x86-64 OSX software is gone too.

I think it's likely x86-64 support (via Rosetta) will continue for quite some time.

Rosetta is giving Apple a competitive advantage by being able to run x86-64 binaries in VMs (Linux or maybe even Windows) at near-native speeds. This enables doing cool things like running MS SQL Server in a Docker container - which enables developing on a full local .NET stack on a Mac.

Perhaps there will be an intermediate step where they drop support for x86-64 executables, but retain support for x86-64 virtualization. That would still let Apple slim down the macOS system frameworks to a single architecture like they did previously when they dropped the x86-32 frameworks.