As we all know, the older Apple Macs were all built using Intel’s powerful processors. But starting in 2020, Apple started transitioning towards their own Apple Silicon chips. In the November of 2020, they first unveiled Apple Macbook that uses Apple silicon M1 processor.
Apple’s M series of chips are the most powerful chips that Apple has designed till now. As far as the performance of the Macs are concerned, they are performing better than the older Intel chips. And now they are producing Macs with M2 and M3 series of chips which are supposed to be much more than the Apple M1 series of the chips.
But since Apple M1, M2 and M3 series of chips use a different set of instructions than the Intel Core series of chips, the older apps that were written for the older versions of macOS are not going to run on the newer macOS versions. For ensuring that your app keeps running on newer versions of Apple macOS, you have to either use Rosetta software or just upgrade the app to use Apple M chips.
In order to find out whether an app installed on your Mac is compatible with the newer versions of macOS, you can use the DigiDNA Silicon software. It is a simple app that displays a list of all the apps installed on your system. For each of the apps, it displays the app title, the app location on the local storage and the type of the app.
If the app is shown as universal, then it will run on newer Apple M chips without Rosetta. If the app is displayed as Intel only, then it will require Rosetta which does not give the same performance as a native app would. You can also drag-n-drop an app on the Silicon app’s window to find if it is compatible with Apple M series of chips.
You can get DigiDNA Silicon from https://github.com/DigiDNA/Silicon.