How can I find out which Mac apps are 32-bit?

Question

On June 28, 2017, Apple announced that

macOS High Sierra will be the last macOS release to support 32-bit apps without compromise.

How can I find out which apps on my Mac are 32-bit so that I can see if I need to upgrade them?

Answer 1

One way to identify what 32-bit apps you're still using is to use the System Information option under About This Mac. The exact steps differ depending on the version of macOS you're running, but below are the broad steps you should be able to follow to suit your circumstances:

1. Click on the Apple Menu
2. Select About This Mac
3. In the About This Mac window that pops up, click on the System Report... button at bottom left (if you're using an older OS, you may need to click on the More Info... button near the centre bottom).
4. This opens up the System Information window (or System Profiler window in older versions of the OS).
5. In the Sidebar on the left you will see a number of headings and subheadings.
6. Under the Software heading (it's the 3rd one down) you'll see a subheading labelled Applications. Click on this.
7. In the main part of the window on the right-hand side you will see a list of apps appear. Be patient as this may take a little while to populate.
8. Once the list appears, you'll see column headings at the top.
9. The last column is labelled 64-Bit (Intel) Click on this column heading to sort apps by whether or not they're 64-Bit (i.e. they'll have either a Yes or No listed against each app).

Refer to the image below as an example:

NOTE: In the above image I've deliberately not sorted the last column so you can see entries with both a Yes and No listed against them. So, in the example above you'll see that iMovie v10.1.6 is a 64-Bit app while iMovie 9.0.9 is not 64-Bit.

---

Edit - If the above steps result in an error

I have seen reports that a small number of users are getting a "The plug-in did not respond quickly enough while gathering this information" error message while waiting for the list to populate.

If this happens, quit the System Information app (or System Profiler app in older versions of macOS) and start again, but this time skip steps 1 to 4 and go directly to your Applications/Utilities folder and open the System Information app (or System Profiler app) directly from there. Once it opens, follow Steps 5 to 8 above.

Answer 2

In the Finder hit cmdF to get a search window.

• Choose Search: This Mac
• Hit the first search criterion and choose "Other..." and here "Executable Architectures" "Is" "i386"

• Hit the + button and add a second criterion "Executable Architectures" "Is not" "x86_64"

  

and you will get a list of all i386 only (i.e. 32-bit) apps.

---

In Terminal this is done with:

mdfind "(kMDItemExecutableArchitectures == 'i386') && (kMDItemExecutableArchitectures != 'x86_64')"

Answer 3

The other answers so far, from what I understand, will list 32-bit macOS apps (and maybe some 32-bit binaries) in the metadata index. If you want to list every 32-bit only executable binary on your system give this one-liner a go:

find / -type f -perm +111 -exec file -p {} \; -exec head -c 1 /dev/zero \; | xargs -0 -n 1 sh -c 'echo "$@" | head -n 1' -- | grep -v x86_64 | grep -E Mach-O.+i386

If you have GNU findutils installed this can probably be considerably simplified. Some of the complexity here is to overcome the limitations of the BSD findutils included in macOS.

Answer 4

This one line Terminal command will collect a list of apps into a text file on your Desktop. It grabs the 6 lines before and 2 lines after every occurrence of "(Intel): No" in the query. It does not however dig into the 32 bit supporting binaries or libraries for already compiled 64 bit apps. That list is much more extensive and I cannot find any resource that addresses a deeper level of concern if it's even an issue.

system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType | grep -B 6 -A 2 "(Intel): No" > ~/Desktop/32BitAppList.txt

Answer 5

When you just need to check a single application:

file myapplication

For instance, my ray tracer, rt:

==> file rt
rt: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
==>

The file command basically looks at many kinds of files and tries to identify them. For OSX executables, you'll almost always see one or more of these: i386, x86_64, and ppc which respectively are 32-bit intel/amd architectures, 64-bit intel/amd architectures, and power PC architectures (these are quite old now.) So you really only have to be concerned with i386 (32-bit applications) and x86_64 (64-bit applications.)

For packaged applications, one should right click and Show Package Contents. In most apps, under contents → macOS one will find an executable. Its path should be used as the argument for file.

Answer 6

I serially kept having the "The plug-in did not respond quickly enough while gathering this information." issue, and couldn't resolve it using any of the suggested methods.

Turns out there's a command-line tool called system_profiler that provides the same information.

So I went straight to the source and wrote a little ruby script to compile a list with more information on where the application is located and the source of install (when available).

You can find the script here.