The “big name apps” have already moved to Apple Silicon. Rosetta helped them with that process a few years ago. We’re down to the long tail apps now. At some point, Rosetta is only helping a couple people and it won’t make sense to support it. I just looked, and right now on my M1 Air, I have exactly one x86 app running, and I was honestly surprised to find that one (Safari plug-in). Everything else is running ARM. My workload is office, general productivity, and Java software development. I’m sure that if you allow your Mac to report back app usage to Apple, they know if you’re using Rosetta or not, and if so, which apps require it. I suspect that’s why they’re telegraphing that they are about ready to pull the plug.
How do you check if you're running any x86 apps?
1. From the Apple menu, click "About This Mac."
2. In the resulting window, click the "More Info..." button. This will open the System Settings window.
3. Scroll to the bottom of that window and click "System Report."
4. In the left side of the resulting window, under "Software," click "Applications." This will provide a list of installed applications. One of the columns for sorting is "Kind"; all apps that are x86 will be listed with the kind, "Intel."
You can replace steps 1–3 with “Open /System/Applications/Utilities/System Information.app”.
Does the MacOS shell not split at spaces, or how does that work without quotation?
That’s not a shell command (otherwise “open” would be lowercase), it’s just an instruction.
Can you explain where you type that for non macOS users?
No it's an instruction for humans
Funny, that didn't occur to me at all. :-/ Maybe that's because I'm used to the FHS and I expected a path starting with /System to be either a path that is interpreted by some command or a description of an UI flow, not a path in the file system. So the thing you would type in the shell is just '/System/Applications/Utilities/System Information.app'? Does the Finder support starting programs by typing the path in the pathbar, like MS Explorer on Windows?
Adobe Acrobat, Steam, and PDF Reader Pro...
To see what’s running,
1. Go into Activity Monitor
2. From the CPU or memory tab, look at the “Kind” column. It’ll either say “Apple” or “Intel.” If the Kind column isn’t visible, right-click on the column labels and select Kind.
In macOS 26, you can see every Rosetta app that has recently run on your machine by going to System Information and then Software / Rosetta Software. It includes the "Fallback Reason" (e.g. if you manually forced the app under Rosetta or if it was an Intel-only binary).
FWIW, I have zero Rosetta apps on my M1 laptop and I've been a Mac user since the earliest days.
I'm super aware of the issues involved--I oversaw the transition from PPC to Intel at a university back in the day, using OG Rosetta. Even then, we had users who would only stop using their PPC apps when you took them from their cold, dead hands.
There's this Silicon app that scans your disk for them: https://github.com/DigiDNA/Silicon.