To Open This App, You’ll Need To Install Rosetta

A developer's perspective setting up Apple’s new M1 Mac Mini

A few months back, I purchased a 2013 Mac Pro to be my daily driver while waiting to see what Apple’s plan was for their new ARM computers. I basically picked up the Mac Pro for my computer collection but was surprised that it is still a powerful computer even at 7 years old. On paper, the base M1 Mac Mini with 8 gigs of ram should blow away my 6 core, fully loaded Mac Pro with 128 gigs of ram. To find out if the reviews praising Apple’s ARM chips were accurate, I bought the M1 Mini to set up for Web and game development. My goal was to use only ARM native applications, and as you can imagine, I didn’t get very far.

Here are some of my early thoughts.

What Doesn’t Run Natively

It won’t come as a surprise to find out that almost all of the Apps I use daily, be it for development or productivity, flat out refuse to install on the M1 Mini without Rosetta. Rosetta 2 is the new Intel translation layer Apple created to run legacy Apps during the transition. Perhaps the most shocking failure right away was Apple’s own Xcode. After opening the version currently on the App Store, I was greeted with the following message.