As a result, Apple has already had the trademark for the term "Rosetta" for sometime, but this new activity and new application surrounding the name is notable given the increasing rumors that Apple is planning on transitioning from Intel to ARM processors in the near future. Apple officially dropped Rosetta support in Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) in 2011.
The trademark could simply be ongoing protection of a long existing trademark for Apple, but given the recent rumors, the new activity raises the possibility that Apple may decide to recycle the "Rosetta" name for a new emulation layer to transition from Intel to ARM. The trademark was filed under the following category:
A computers computer network And the computer software in which development of the computer programmes on a global communication network and the download for translating and performing are possible, computer software for computings performed by a cross platform, computer software, Electronic machines [apparatus and their parts]
Apple has been widely rumored to transition from Intel to ARM processors in the coming year, but there has be no rumors about how Apple would handle the transition with regard to emulation. Apple currently lists "Rosetta" without the "Apple" prefix in their list of active trademarks.
While the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are not expected to launch until September, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices.
Below, we recap key changes rumored for the iPhone 17 Pro models as of March 2025:
Aluminum frame: iPhone 17 Pro models are rumored to have an aluminum frame, whereas the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro models have a titanium frame, and the iPhone ...
Apple is expected to release iOS 18.4 to the general public as soon as next week, following more than a month of beta testing.
Apple's website says some iOS 18.4 features will be released in "early April," so the update should be out as early as Tuesday, April 1.
Apple this week seeded the iOS 18.4 Release Candidate, which is typically the final beta version, barring the discovery of any...
Tuesday March 25, 2025 11:52 am PDT by Juli Clover
Leaker Jon Prosser today shared a mockup of what he says the Messages app will look like in iOS 19, demoing an interface with rounded, translucent bubble-shaped navigation buttons at the top and softer, rounder corners for the keyboard and word suggestions.
Jon Prosser's Messages app mockup
The return button, a button for going back to the Messages list, and the FaceTime button have a deeper...
Thursday March 20, 2025 12:01 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
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The new perk is the ability to create invitations in the Apple Invites app for the iPhone, which launched in the App Store last month.
In the Apple Invites app, iCloud+ subscribers can create invitations for any occasion, such as birthday parties, graduations, baby showers, and more. Anyone ...
Apple today announced that AirPods Max with a USB-C port will be gaining support for lossless audio and ultra-low latency audio with a firmware update next month, alongside the release of iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS 15.4.
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Wednesday March 26, 2025 12:19 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple is going all out with promotions for the popular Severance Apple TV+ show today, and as of right now, you'll find a new "Lumon Terminal Pro" listed on Apple's Mac site.
The Lumon Terminal Pro is designed to look similar to the machines that Severance employees like Mark S. and Helly R. use for macrodata refinement. The Terminal features a blue keyboard, a small display with wide...
The iOS 19 mockup images that leaker Jon Prosser shared today are not representative of the actual iOS 19 design, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said on social media.
According to Gurman, the images that are "floating around" are based on "very old builds" or "vague descriptions," and are lacking key features. Gurman says that we can "expect more from Apple in June."
Gurman made the same comment ...
Wednesday March 26, 2025 4:53 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple regularly refreshes the MacBook Pro models, and a new version that uses M5 series chips is in the works. Apple just finished refreshing most of the Mac lineup with M4 chips, and now it's time for the M5. Rumors suggest that we could see the first M5 MacBook Pro models this fall.
Design
There have been no rumors of a design update for the M5 MacBook Pro models that are coming this...
But for anyone that's familiar with the concept of the Rosetta Stone, this could be very well the re-used "new" name for Safari's offline translation software as well. (I know what Apple's Rosetta was, just saying.)
That gives me some hope, because I was becoming increasingly worried that Apple was going to rely entirely on developers re-compiling code and not provide an emulation layer.
Obviously the key question here is going to be performance. How fast will binary translation/emulation be and just as importantly how fast are Apple's ARM chips going to be relative to modern Intel Core/AMD Ryzen.
The original Rosetta's performance was acceptable (quite impressive actually on a technical level), particularly for Apple's notebook lineup, but this was due in large part to just how far behind the PowerPC chips used in Apple's notebooks were compared to x86 at the time. Even the original Core Duos used in the first generation MacBooks absolutely destroyed not only the PowerPC G4s used in Apple's iBook/Powerbooks, but even a lot of PowerPC G5 based Macs.
I highly doubt Apple is going to have quite that large of a performance margin this time around so it will be interesting to see just what they can achieve.
...OTOH, if you put an SSD in an old (circa 2010) Mac with a pre Sandy Bridge Core Ix chip (or even Core 2 Duo) it is surprisingly usable today, so perhaps, for casual users this won't matter as much...
Can't say I'm excited. Please let this just be an additional ISA to be used where it makes sense, and not a whole scale transition (unlikely I know, but I can dream right.)
Oh no. Here we go again. I remember that this was how you had to run Power PC apps on Intel machines. That was living hell. What a kluge. If Apple is going to make us do the same for new ARM computers, I am going to be done with it and get a PC.
