What you need to know
- iMazing has released a free tool that checks whether your apps are compatible with Apple silicon.
Apple's new M1 Macs are proving very popular indeed and you could well be tempted to pick one up because they're super fast, super quiet, and super cool. But what if the apps you use every day aren't ready for Apple silicon? How do you even find out? The folk at iMazing have launched a free open source tool that has the answers.
The tool, simply called Silicon, can scan your Applications folder – or you can drag an app into Silicon's window – and then tell you whether an app is M1-ready or built for Intel. If it's the latter your app should still work – it'll just need to run via Rosetta 2 instead.
Thankfully, Rosetta 2 is so fast that it shouldn't impact performance too much. But if you want to make full use of the power afforded by the M1 chip you're going to want a universal app wherever possible. And Silicon will tell you which apps are ready to do their thing on a shiny new M1 Mac.
You can download Silicon for free from iMazing and it's even up on Github, too.
