Five weeks after macOS 27 "Golden Gate" shipped, the Rosetta Check community catalogue tracks 31,665 Intel-only Mac apps and components across 7,261 Apple Silicon Macs. 22.9% have a confirmed native build; the other 24,415 are still waiting. Half the Macs that have scanned since launch day are already on macOS 27, and Rosetta 2 still runs everything on it. That changes with macOS 28, a year from now.
Golden Gate brought no rush of native builds
When a Mac in the community first reports a native build of an app that was Intel-only, I record the month. A major macOS release is when developers ship updates, so September should have been the peak. It wasn't: 378 apps went native in September, fewer than August's 590. Over the eight weeks since the August snapshot the catalogue confirmed 695 new native builds but discovered 2,590 more Intel-only items, so the native share moved from 22.5% to 22.9%.
September (amber) is the month macOS 27 shipped.
A few hundred apps a month against a backlog of 24,415 is the pace to plan around.
What a typical Mac carries
Across the latest scan from each Mac, the median Mac carries 13 Intel-only items. The distribution has a long tail: one Mac in seven carries more than 50, and 223 carry more than 100. Measured on disk, the median Mac holds at least 0.83 GB of Intel-only software; across the community that adds up to 19.2 TB.
Median: 13 items. Mean: 26. The heaviest single Mac reported 793.
Where the Intel code lives
Three quarters of the Intel installs we see are standalone apps. The other quarter is the layer nobody double-clicks: launch agents and daemons that start at login (19,265 installs), audio plug-ins loaded by DAWs (15,844), frameworks, browser plug-ins and preference panes. Audio plug-ins are the most fragmented: 5,731 distinct items, each on only a handful of Macs, and the best served, with a native build seen for a third of them.
One in four Intel installs is not an app you can see in /Applications: it is a helper, plug-in, framework or driver that something else loads.
Printers and scanners: on more than half of all Macs
4,093 of 7,164 Macs (57%) carry at least one Intel-only item from Epson, Canon, HP or Brother. Epson alone is on two Macs in five. These are mostly drivers installed years ago for a printer that still works, carried from Mac to Mac by Migration Assistant. Nothing breaks, so nobody notices.
The same vendors dominate the most-installed list. Canon's IJScanner2 is still the single most widespread Intel-only item in the catalogue, on 1,847 Macs: one in four. Brother Status Monitor joined the top fifteen this quarter, and none of August's fifteen has had a native build confirmed since.
12 of the top 15 are printer or scanner software; the other three are Adobe installer and plug-in leftovers.
If your printer supports AirPrint, macOS can print and scan without any vendor driver at all. The guide to printing and scanning without Intel drivers walks through it.
The holdouts, six months on
In May I listed the best-known consumer apps with no Apple Silicon build. Since then the community has grown from 2,794 Macs to 7,261. Eight of them still have not had a single native sighting (Logitech Unifying Software has one), and they have held or grown their share of Macs: Google Earth Pro was on 14.0% of Macs in May and is on 14.0% now. Nobody is uninstalling them.
| App | May 2026 Macs | Oct 2026 Macs | Native sightings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Earth Pro | 391 (14.0%) | 1,016 (14.0%) | none |
| Garmin Express | 282 (10.1%) | 795 (10.9%) | none |
| Kindle Classic | 200 (7.2%) | 585 (8.1%) | none |
| iPhoto (Apple) | 100 (3.6%) | 428 (5.9%) | none |
| Android File Transfer | 148 (5.3%) | 373 (5.1%) | none |
| OpenOffice | 103 (3.7%) | 297 (4.1%) | none |
| Amazon Photos | 121 (4.3%) | 292 (4.0%) | none |
| Garmin BaseCamp | 79 (2.8%) | 227 (3.1%) | none |
| Logitech Unifying Software | 83 (3.0%) | 211 (2.9%) | 1 |
| AusweisApp | 125 (4.5%) | 478 (6.6%) | 146 |
| ClipGrab | 100 (3.6%) | 255 (3.5%) | 72 |
| Sonos (legacy controller) | 90 (3.2%) | 248 (3.4%) | 47 |
| TomTom MyDrive Connect | 56 (2.0%) | 115 (1.6%) | 53 |
A few did move. AusweisApp, ClipGrab and the legacy Sonos controller now have native builds in the wild, and TomTom's native sightings grew from 13 to 53. For those, the fix is an update.
For the three biggest, I looked at what each vendor has actually said.
Google Earth Pro: very unlikely, and it is leaving
Google's own download page now carries a banner: Google Earth Pro on desktop will no longer be available for download from 25 June 2027. Installed copies keep working, but there has never been an Apple Silicon build, and Google is pointing users to Google Earth on the web and mobile instead (TechRadar has Google's confirmation). On 1,016 Macs in our data, it is the biggest consumer app on this list, and both of its exits land in 2027: new downloads stop in June, and general Rosetta support ends with macOS 28 that autumn. If you rely on it for KML work, QGIS is free and native.
Garmin Express: possible, but unconfirmed
Garmin has never shipped a native build, and macOS 27 showed how fragile that is. For the first weeks after launch, the Express installer refused to run on Apple Silicon Macs because of a hard check for Intel hardware. Garmin's support staff said on its forum that version 7.29.3 fixed it. the5krunner reports that a Garmin representative said a version for newer Macs is in development and is aimed for release within the year, with no date given. Garmin's own replies in its long-running Apple Silicon thread make no commitment. With 795 Macs running Express and another 227 running BaseCamp, this is the one to watch. Until a native build ships, keep a working install and do not delete the installer.
Kindle Classic: never, because the replacement already exists
Amazon retired Kindle Classic in 2023 and replaced it with a new Kindle app from the Mac App Store, which runs natively on Apple Silicon. Classic will not be updated again, yet it is still on 585 Macs, more than in May. Delete it and install the App Store version; your library downloads again from your Amazon account.
Old copies of apps that went native long ago
Some of the Intel code in the catalogue belongs to apps whose current version is native. Those Macs are simply running an old copy, and that share has barely moved since May. About one Word install in twenty is still the Intel build, as it was in May. For VLC it is more than one in four.
Each of these has a current native release. The fix is an update, not a replacement.
If Rosetta Check flags any of these on your Mac, update the app through the Mac App Store, Microsoft AutoUpdate or the app's own updater.
Dead weight
Some Intel code is not waiting for anything, because it can no longer run. Safari dropped support for legacy NPAPI browser plug-ins years ago, yet 133 of them are still installed, on 5,603 Macs, and only 3 have ever been seen as native builds. The biggest:
- Adobe PDF Viewer (NPAPI): 1,230 Macs
- SharePoint Browser Plugin: 817 Macs
- Flip4Mac WMV Plugin: 373 Macs
- Java: 184 Macs
They sit in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins and ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins. No current browser loads them, so they can be deleted.
A smaller oddity: 356 Intel-only items still carry com.yourcompany, Xcode's placeholder bundle identifier, on 1,165 Macs. Their developers never changed the template default, which says something about how much attention they have had since. The most common is an installer's maintenancetool, on 113 Macs.
Command-line tools: first look
Tool scanning started on 9 August, so this is a corpus still filling in: 651 Intel-only tool products from 620 Macs. Its clearest finding is about Homebrew. Of 331 Homebrew packages seen as Intel builds, 313 (95%) already have an Apple Silicon bottle. These are not missing ports; they are Intel Homebrew installs, usually under /usr/local and carried over from an Intel Mac. Even the most common, xz, is on 41 Macs as an Intel build against 328 as native.
An Intel Homebrew package on an Apple Silicon Mac is almost always an old install, not a missing port.
The other 320 tools are binaries shipped by commercial developers or inside apps. The biggest, a Parallels Desktop crash-dump helper, is on 206 Macs. For about a third of these, the native fix is an update to the app that installed them. If you see Intel Homebrew packages in your scan, reinstalling them under a native Homebrew in /opt/homebrew replaces them.
About this data
Every number comes from opt-in community scans: 7,261 Apple Silicon Macs and 86,194 scans to 21 October 2026, with native builds confirmed by the same Mach-O architecture check that flags Intel binaries. It is a self-selected sample of people who care about the transition, so treat counts as lower bounds. New Intel-only entries mostly mean newly discovered old software, not new Intel code. Changes are measured against a snapshot from 24 August 2026, eight weeks earlier; from the next edition, comparisons are quarter on quarter. Full details are on the methodology page.
To see where your own Mac stands, the Rosetta Check app scans it in about a minute.