By default, a Mac with Apple Silicon will always run the ARM version of a universal binary app, if available. But sometimes older plugins you rely on may not yet be upgraded to support Apple Silicon. Fortunately, it is easy to force macOS to run the Intel version of an app through Rosetta. Here̵
First open your “Applications” folder. One way to do this quickly is to open “Finder” and choose Go> Applications from the menu bar at the top of the screen. You can also open a Finder window and click “Applications” in the sidebar.
In the “Applications” folder, find the universal binary app you want to use over Rosetta. Right-click (or Ctrl-click) the app’s icon and select ‘Get Info’.
In the “Get Info” window that appears, look to the bottom of the “General” section. Check the box labeled ‘Open with Rosetta’.
You can now close the Info window.
The next time you open the app, the x86_64 version of the app will open with Rosetta instead of the arm64 version. To use the Apple Silicon version of the app instead, reopen the Get Info window and turn off Open with Rosetta. Good luck!
Hopefully, this will become less necessary over time. Apple’s first Apple Silicon Macs, featuring the M1 chip, will provide developers with a platform to port their applications to ARM so that they run natively on future Apple Silicon Macs.
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