The launch of the Rosetta dynamic binary translation layer with the release of version 4.4 of Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) in early 2006 allowed PowerPC applications to work on Intel-powered Macs. This feature was available in Leopard and Snow Leopard before it was dropped in Mac OS X Lion (10.7) in mid-2011.

Rosetta 2 was released in 2020 with the release of macOS Big Sur (11.0) for Apple Silicon Macs. This version of Rosetta allows applications designed for Intel Macs to run on Apple Silicon Macs in a similar fashion but it has more of a hardware component and it likely won't be discontinued by Apple in the foreseeable future.