Silicon For Mac

Once Apple moved on from Intel processors, it was left to developers to update their apps to run natively on Apple Silicon. Some have done so quickly, but others are still relying on Rosetta 2 emulation, either due to technical difficulties or slow development.

Silicon is a simple open-source utility that analyzes every app on your Mac and identifies their architecture. It can help you find apps that were designed for Intel and don’t run as efficiently as they could on Apple’s processors.

The application is quite simple to use. Once you’ve run a scan, you can see each app’s architecture on the right, and you can also browse to its location should you want to remove it. You can also filter them based on Apple Silicon compatibility and search for specific items.

You can choose to exclude Apple applications from the search, which is a good idea since they all run natively. You can include locations outside the Applications folder and search within app directories for additional apps.

Lastly, you can drop an app in the main window to check it separately, but this isn’t all that helpful since it’s easier to just access Get Info from the app’s context menu.

Of course, you can already see a list of all your apps and their architecture from the Storage Management tool. Here, you can also see when they were last accessed and the amount of storage space they use up. From System Information, you can get even more info, but it's hardly accessible.

Some advantages Silicon has are: the ability to show only Intel or Apple Silicon native apps, a search tool, and the option to search within application folders for additional plugins or helper apps that may not themselves be native. It can also be useful if a bug causes the Storage panel to be inaccessible.

Silicon does the job, but it’s a job that’s mostly covered by the Storage Management and System Information utilities. It does things a bit differently, they all largely provide the same info. If you find it useful, it’s free and open-source, so you can try it out at no cost.