3 ms·

Why would there be a runtime flag and not just the appropriate binary installed?

• Someone 6y ago
  One might want to install it on an external disk that you move between machines and use as boot device. I think that’s quite a corner-case.
  • alwillis 6y ago
    One might want to install it on an external disk that you move between machines and use as boot device. I think that’s quite a corner-case. Not at all; did all the time when the PowerPC to Intel transition happened. If you have an Intel Mac and wanted to use your universal apps on a friend’s M1 Mac mini with your operating system configured the way you like it, that's by far the easiest way to go. I upgrade to the universal versions of Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher earlier today; if I had to do something complex and could use an M1 Mac, that's exactly what I'd do.
    • wiredfool 6y ago
      I did that, 10.5 IIRC. For some reason, I could only install on my Intel iMac, but I wanted to resurrect a PPC mini that had died. Oddly, the imac is long gone, but the mini can still run ubuntu, and is still (somewhat) useful for testing bigendian bugs. It's slower than a raspberry pi of a few years back.
• adrian_mrd 6y ago
  I was thinking of the case where only some of the core companion OS apps (Preview, TextEdit, Messages, etc) had been updated to ARM, so the OS would need to check if they are to be run as native (ARM) or Universal (Intel). But assumably Apple has updated all of these apps to be ARM native on ARM OS binary installs? update: clarified sentence
  • alwillis 6y ago
    All of Apple's apps (at least on my Intel iMac with Big Sur) are universal apps.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Almost all the code in the OS is built as Universal. There are a few exceptions, but most of those are to load Intel plugins and such.