The End of an (Intel) Era
Hello, you amazing pack of developers!
It’s an exciting time of year: Apple has just announced a swathe of new devices, including iPhone 18 Pro and the intriguing new iPhone Duo. We’re about to get all new operating systems for the coming year, and a bunch of new API in the SDKs that come with those releases.
And my personal favourite — a brand new version of Xcode! Xcode 27 comes with some really impressive improvements including a bunch of agentic coding tools that I’ve been using to prepare new releases of Reveal.
One of the big changes this year is that macOS 27 “Golden Gate” is dropping support for older Intel-based Macs, and alongside it, so is Xcode 27. On its own, that’s not a huge problem - the macOS SDKs still include support for building Mac apps that can target Intel Macs, and we’ll do just that for Reveal.app for as long as it makes sense to.
The problem is that Apple is no longer shipping Simulator runtimes and SDKs that include Intel slices, so we can’t build RevealServer for that architecture anymore.
We’ve had a good think about our options here, but the reality is that any workaround we could put in place to continue supporting RevealServer on Intel Macs will end up compromising our ability to support new API that has been added in the 27 SDKs (and releases that come after that). The majority of our users are now on Apple Silicon Macs, so they won’t be affected by this change.
What does this mean?
The next release of Reveal’s bundled RevealServer.xcframework won’t include an Intel/x86_64 Simulator slice.
If you use an Apple Silicon Mac, you’re fine. Everything will work as it always has.
If you use an Intel Mac:
- You can still inject RevealServer into apps running on actual devices as you always have.
- You won’t be able to inject RevealServer into Simulator apps that you build and run on your Intel Mac.
Have Questions?
As always, if you have any questions please send us an email – we’re happy to answer any questions you have about this change.
The photo in the header of this post is by Sebastien Gabriel found on Unsplash.
