Five years into the Apple silicon transition, the headline question has a comfortable answer for most people. Ask “does my Mac still run Intel apps?” and the honest reply is that the apps you open every day are native now. But the apps you open are only the visible layer. Beneath them is a second, larger world of embedded Intel code: audio plug-ins, printer drivers, video effects, screen savers, browser plug-ins and background helpers that nobody double-clicks and nobody audits. Rosetta Check 2.0 scans that layer, and the data tells a far more interesting story than any app list.
The iceberg: apps you see vs. components you don't
The catalogue holds more than 20,900 distinct Intel binaries. Of those, around 15,800 are applications (things with a Dock icon) and more than 5,100 are components: embedded binaries loaded by other software. Applications outnumber components roughly three to one, which makes it tempting to treat components as a rounding error. They are not. Components are the part of the migration nobody plans for. You can't see them in the Applications folder, and they don't show up when you tidy your Dock.
Distinct Intel binaries in the catalogue, split by type. The apps are the iceberg's tip. The components are what a host app drags into memory the moment it launches.
And here is what makes that surprising: every contributing Mac in this dataset is an Apple silicon machine, M1 through M5, running a current macOS. None of this is “old Intel hardware nobody replaced.” It is native silicon carrying an average of around six Intel component installs each. The CPU has to translate every one of them through Rosetta 2, quietly, in the background.
Most apps went native. Some copies never got the update.
Start with the good news. The apps people open every day are overwhelmingly native, and for thousands of titles the community has confirmed a shipping Apple silicon build. Yet a stubborn tail of Macs still runs the Intel copy of an app whose native version already exists and is already widely deployed.
The scale is bigger than it looks. Nearly 500 applications in the catalogue have a heavily confirmed native build. Together they still account for more than 22,000 Intel installs across the Macs that have reported in. The native build already works. The local copy is just out of date.
These are not obscure tools. VLC, Zoom, Steam, Spotify and the Microsoft Office apps all sit near the top, each with a native release that has been out for years. The reason a Mac ends up on this list is almost always the same: the Intel copy was installed a long time ago, and nothing since has replaced it. Migration Assistant carries the old bundle from an Intel Mac to an Apple silicon one. Or the app simply predates the user's first M-series machine and was moved across with everything else. Most in-app auto-updaters then refresh the binary in place, Intel stays Intel, and the architecture switch never happens unless someone manually downloads the new installer. Nothing breaks, so nobody notices.
Steam is a slightly different case worth calling out. Valve has shipped an Apple silicon native client for a while, but it lives in the Steam Client Beta channel. The default download from steampowered.com is still the Intel build, and an existing install will only switch over if the user opts in to beta updates from inside the client. That explains why Steam carries around 190 Intel installs in the catalogue despite a native version existing. The fix is one checkbox, but you have to know to look for it.
Microsoft Office: universal for years, still Intel on hundreds of Macs
Office is the clearest example. Office for Mac has shipped as a universal binary since late 2020, so every recent install runs native on Apple silicon. The numbers back that up. Across Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook, the community has logged close to 11,900 native confirmations. And yet the same five apps still report an Intel build across about 650 installs.
Why would an app that went universal years ago still show up as Intel? Microsoft AutoUpdate does refresh an existing Intel install to the universal build, so a Mac in active use should not stay on the old binary for long. The remaining Intel installs are almost certainly copies that nobody is using. MAU only runs when an Office app is launched or when its helper is active, and on a machine where Word and Excel are sitting on disk untouched, possibly because the licence lapsed or the user moved to a different suite, MAU never gets the chance. The install lingers as the Intel bundle it arrived as. Office is a useful reminder that “the vendor went universal” and “every install on every Mac is native” are two different things.
Setup once, translate forever: installers and uninstallers
The last group is the quietest of all. A large slice of the Intel app tail is made of helpers that exist to run exactly once: installers, setup assistants, uninstallers and bundled updaters. You launch them a single time and they do their job. Then they sit on disk as Intel code that macOS must translate on the rare occasion anything calls them again.
The catalogue holds 367 distinct Intel installers, 486 uninstallers and a long tail of standalone updaters, together carrying thousands of installs. The uninstaller is the small irony of the set: a translated Intel binary whose only job is to remove the software it shipped with, kept around for a day that may never come. None of these helpers affect daily use. They only pad the Intel footprint and make a clean audit harder.
Components by category: audio takes nearly half the chart
Roll the components up to the products that ship them, and one category dwarfs the rest. Audio plug-ins alone account for roughly 46% of every embedded Intel binary on the platform. That is more than the next four categories combined.
- Audio2,356 · 46%
- macOS system extension720 · 14%
- Video415 · 8%
- Photo & graphics138 · 3%
- Security & VPN134 · 3%
- Peripheral / driver119 · 2%
- Developer & runtime94 · 2%
- Backup & disk93 · 2%
- Productivity70 · 1%
- Other27 · 1%
- Unknown / unscoped1,005 · 19%
And the interesting question is what “audio” actually means here. Is it one app? One vendor? If it were only Pro Tools or one plug-in suite, the advice would be trivial: update that one thing. It isn't. The audio slice is the sum of two effects. Together they explain why audio will be the last category standing when macOS 28 removes Rosetta.
Audio, reason one: every plug-in ships four times
A professional audio plug-in is not one file. Vendors build the same product in several competing formats so it loads in every host. There's AAX for Avid Pro Tools, Audio Unit for Apple's Logic and GarageBand, and VST2 plus VST3 for nearly everything else. Rosetta Check sees each of those as a separate binary, because to your Mac they are separate: four files on disk, four things to translate.
Look how flat those bars are. AAX, Audio Unit and VST2 sit nearly tied at around 750 binaries each. That is the tell: this isn't three different problems, it is the same plug-ins replicated across three or four formats. When iZotope's “Relay” shows up, it shows up as six binaries. Native Instruments “Massive” appears as five. One product, one install, one update, yet four to six distinct Intel files ride along.
Audio, reason two: it's the whole industry, not one vendor
The second effect is breadth. Those audio components span more than 230 distinct vendors. The distribution has a clear head, and it is worth understanding what that head represents.
Avid Pro Tools tops the chart, but read that carefully. The bar counts the AAX plug-ins that load inside Pro Tools: Avid's own factory bundle plus the third-party AAX builds it hosts. It does not count the Pro Tools application, which is itself native. The same is true down the list. We group these by the vendor's update portal, not the host DAW, because that is the practical answer. You update an iZotope plug-in through the iZotope Product Portal, a Native Instruments plug-in through Native Access, and a Universal Audio plug-in through UAD Connect, whichever DAW eventually loads it.
The most-installed Intel code on Mac: printer and scanner drivers
So far we've been counting how many different Intel binaries exist. That measure rewards variety, which is why audio wins: lots of plug-ins, each on a handful of Macs. A more useful question for most people is the opposite one. Which Intel binaries are on the largest number of Macs? Rank the data that way and a category most people never think about jumps to the top: printer and scanner drivers.
Epson alone accounts for more than 4,800 Intel-only driver installs across the roughly 4,600 Macs in the catalogue. Brother adds nearly 3,000, HP nearly 2,500, and Canon and DYMO each contribute around 1,200. Those headline numbers look worse than they are. A single printer install scatters its CUPS filters, scanner helpers and status apps across the system as several separate binaries, so the totals represent a few hundred Macs each carrying the same handful of files.
The better news: printing is one corner of macOS where you rarely need the manufacturer's software anymore. Almost any printer sold in the last decade or so supports AirPrint, which goes through Apple's own system and needs no vendor driver at all. For older models that pre-date AirPrint, Apple still ships and signs current universal driver packages for Epson, Brother, Canon and HP through Software Update; removing the original installer and re-adding the printer in System Settings is usually enough to pick them up. For genuinely abandoned hardware, the open-source Gutenprint project ships universal drivers covering hundreds of older models.
DYMO is the exception worth calling out. Their roughly 1,200 Intel installs in the catalogue are almost all label printers, which sit outside the AirPrint ecosystem entirely and aren't covered by Apple's bundled driver packages. DYMO does ship a universal DYMO Connect for Desktop, but the older DYMO Label software that many people are still running is Intel-only. Anyone with a recent LabelWriter has a clean upgrade path; anyone on the old software will need to switch to DYMO Connect or, eventually, to different hardware.
Scanners are the harder half. Modern network multifunctions work driverlessly through Apple's Image Capture using the AirScan protocol, and Apple's bundled driver packages cover the scanner side of most older MFPs from Epson, Brother, Canon and HP. The genuinely hard case is the dedicated USB flatbed or film scanner whose manufacturer never shipped an Apple silicon driver. The vendor's Intel software still works today under Rosetta 2, but Rosetta 2's general-app support ends with macOS 28. That's a deadline, not a fix. Technical users have one open-source lifeline: SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy), a long-running Linux-world project that ships free drivers, called "backends", for hundreds of legacy USB scanners. The sane-backends Homebrew formula is current (1.4.0, released May 2025) and ships native Apple silicon bottles, giving you a scanimage command-line tool that can drive most supported hardware. The catch is the GUI side: SANE's own front-end package hasn't seen a release since 2005, the old TWAIN-SANE bridge that used to plug it into Image Capture is unmaintained, and the handful of working third-party GUIs are niche. For most people SANE workflows end up at the command line. For everyone else, this is the one corner of the catalogue where the honest answer is to budget for a replacement AirScan-capable scanner while the old one still works.
Leftovers: things that load even though nobody asked
A few categories in the catalogue exist almost entirely as leftovers. The dataset contains more than 300 distinct Intel screen savers, including Aerial, BOINC and aquarium themes, most installed once and forgotten. The old browser-plug-in slot is worse. Adobe's PDF browser plug-ins account for more than 1,500 installs between them, a SharePoint browser plug-in adds roughly 400, and Telestream's Flip4Mac WMV plug-in, a relic of the Windows Media era, is still on nearly 200. None of these do anything useful on a modern Mac. They persist as Intel binaries waiting to be loaded.
And now the good news
It would be easy to read all of this as doom. It isn't. The same catalogue shows the transition working. The apps people open every day are overwhelmingly native now, and the community has confirmed Apple silicon builds for thousands of titles that were Intel-only a year ago. The Intel long tail is real, but it clusters in exactly the places you'd expect software to age slowly: pro-creative plug-ins and peripheral drivers. Almost all of it has a clean native path that's one vendor-updater away.
Measuring matters because you can't fix what you can't see. The apps were never the hard part. The four-format plug-in you forgot you owned, and the printer driver from two Macs ago that Migration Assistant faithfully carried forward, are. Scan your own Mac with Rosetta Check to see your personal version of the chart above, and which layer of the iceberg you're standing on.
Methodology: figures are aggregate counts from opted-in Rosetta Check clients. “Components” are non-application Intel binaries (audio/video plug-ins, drivers, extensions, helpers). Family roll-ups map each component's bundle identifier to the vendor product that ships and updates it. We generate the charts programmatically from the live snapshot and refresh them when the post is updated.