Silicon

Silicon is a handy little tool that helps you figure out which apps on your Mac are running on Intel processors instead of Apple Silicon. When Apple made the switch to their own chips, it left developers with the task of updating their apps to work better with these new processors. Some jumped right in and updated their apps, while others are still using Rosetta 2 emulation because they hit some bumps along the way.

How Does Silicon Work?

This open-source utility scans all your applications and tells you what architecture they’re using. After you run a scan, you'll see a list of your apps along with their architectures on the right side of the screen. Plus, if you want to clean up your Mac, you can easily find where each app is located for removal.

Filtering Options

You can even filter results based on whether an app is compatible with Apple Silicon or not. This is super useful! Oh, and if you're wondering about those built-in Apple apps, you can choose to exclude them from your search since they already run natively on Apple’s hardware.

Searching for Apps

If you're looking for more than just what's in your Applications folder, no worries! You can search through different locations and dive into app directories to find extra plugins or helper apps that might not be native yet.

An Easy Way to Check Apps

If you want to check an individual app, just drop it into the main window of Silicon. It’s straightforward but keep in mind that checking its info from the context menu might be quicker.

The Storage Management Tool

You probably already know that there’s a way to see all your apps and their architectures using the Storage Management tool too. Here, you'll also find out when each app was last used and how much space they're taking up on your Mac. If you dig deeper into System Information, you'll uncover even more details—but it’s not always easy to get to!

Why Use Silicon?

So why bother with Silicon? Well, it gives you some cool advantages like showing only Intel or Apple Silicon native apps. You also get a helpful search tool that works within application folders for those sneaky plugins! Plus, it's great if there's a bug making the Storage panel hard to access.

At the end of the day, while Silicon does its job well, remember that most of this info can also be found through Storage Management and System Information utilities. They might just do things a bit differently than this tool. If you're curious about trying it out—and why not?—it’s free and open-source!