If you’re talking about the simulator, no. That doesn’t virtualize - it literally just runs it locally on your machine. Less RAM overhead and CPU since it uses your normal instruction set and doesn’t run a separate kernel and userspace.
At least historically, it actually did run its own entire userspace, including daemons (all the way to launchd, IIRC), etc. All compiled for Intel, back in the day. Shared the kernel though.
Many of the nominally shared system pieces between Mac and iPhone (like Foundation) actually had many subtle compile-time differences.
Private cloud compute I think. I learnt about it today too from this reddit post which mentions how:
> At WWDC, Apple announced that starting in the 27.x versions of iOS, macOS, etc., devs would be able to call Private Cloud Compute directly from Swift with no additional API configuration. Presently, the only way to get free cloud inference is by joining the App Store Small Business Program.
Many of the nominally shared system pieces between Mac and iPhone (like Foundation) actually had many subtle compile-time differences.
> At WWDC, Apple announced that starting in the 27.x versions of iOS, macOS, etc., devs would be able to call Private Cloud Compute directly from Swift with no additional API configuration. Presently, the only way to get free cloud inference is by joining the App Store Small Business Program.
https://www.reddit.com/r/appledevelopers/comments/1vztibh/re...