Moving to an Intel Mac: Which Apps Do You Upgrade?

Did you buy a new Mac in the past year? Are you planning to buy one soon? When you move from an old PowerPC-based Mac to a new Intel Mac, you’ll probably carry over or reload a lot of your programs. Older PowerPC applications generally run on Intel Macs, but in a “Rosetta” translation mode that’s slower than apps written for Intel. Most Mac programs have been rewritten into “Universal Binaries” that run natively on PowerPC and Intel Macs. How can you tell which apps are PowerPC-only and which are Universal? If you have Tiger, its built-in System Profiler can show you a full list.

Why should you care? If you’re moving to an Intel Mac, you’ll want to find your PowerPC programs and upgrade them to Universal Binaries if possible. If you’re already on an Intel Mac, you should track down any PowerPC programs you still have around, since they’re running in a less-than-optimal way under Rosetta.

How to check. It’s easy to check on one program. First, find its icon in your Applications folder (to get there, you can right-click or Control-click on its dock icon and choose “Show in Finder”). Now, right-click/Control-click on the program’s icon and choose “Get Info”. You’ll find what you’re looking for under “Kind”, as shown below.

It would be a lot more helpful to get a list of all the PowerPC programs on your system. If you have OS X 10.4 (Tiger), you can find this list in the System Profiler, which is in your Applications/Utilities folder. A quick way to open the System Profiler is to click the apple in the top left corner or your screen, choose “About this Mac,”, and then press the “More info” button.

In the System Profiler, find the Contents pane on the left, and open up the Software list. Choose Applications, and then sort your list by Kind.

What should you do about it? If you see any of the Apple programs that come with your Mac, don’t worry about them; they’ll all be native to whatever kind of system you’re running, PowerPC or Universal (Intel). Even if you have an older Mac, you may see some Universal programs listed. Those became Universal binaries transparently, in a past upgrade.

Take a look at the PowerPC list. If you see programs that you installed but are no longer using, you should delete them, ideally with a program like AppZapper. For programs that you rely on, check to see if there’s a newer Universal release. Check at the developer’s web site (just Google the program’s name or look it up at VersionTracker). In many cases, the update to a Universal Binary version will be free. However, some apps went Universal as part of a major upgrade, and you may have to buy the upgrade.

If there’s an upgrade cost, you’ll have to decide if it’s worth upgrading. Your program may run just fine in the Rosetta compatibility mode on an Intel Mac, it may be unacceptably slow, or it may not run at all. See what you can find out at the web site.