What Apple silicon changed for small utilities

In late 2020, Apple began moving the Mac from Intel processors to chips of its own design, starting with the M1. Within a few years, every new Mac was Apple silicon.

For large apps, the change was mostly about performance. For small utilities — the kind that sit in the menu bar, rename files or unpack archives — it changed a few more things, and some of them matter when choosing what to install.

Native, translated, universal

An app's code is compiled for a specific kind of processor. After the transition, a Mac app can be:

Native for Apple silicon — compiled for Apple's chips (the "arm64" architecture). It runs directly.

Intel-only — compiled for Intel chips. On an Apple silicon Mac, it runs through Rosetta 2, Apple's translation layer, which converts the code the first time the app runs. Rosetta is remarkably good, but translated apps generally use more energy and run somewhat slower than native ones.

Universal — contains both versions in one app. Each Mac runs the one that suits it.

Checking what your apps run on

Open Activity Monitor and look at the Kind column in the CPU tab. It shows Apple for native processes and Intel for ones running under Rosetta. (If the column is missing, right-click the column headers to add it.)

For an app that is not running, select it in Finder and choose File → Get Info. The Kind line says Application (Universal), Application (Apple silicon) or Application (Intel).

It is worth a look. Intel-only apps are the ones most likely to be abandoned, and Apple has said Intel support in macOS is coming to an end, including for Rosetta over the next few releases. An app you depend on that is still Intel-only is a question worth asking its developer.

What changed for small utilities

Energy matters more than speed. A renamer or archive utility is rarely slow on any modern Mac. But a menu bar app or background helper runs all day, and on a laptop the difference between efficient native code and translated code shows up in battery life. Apple silicon's efficiency cores handle light background work while using very little power — for native code that is written to let them.

Unified memory. Apple silicon shares one pool of memory between the processor and the graphics. For most utilities this is invisible; for anything that processes large images or video, it removes copying between separate memory pools.

Fast storage and compression. Apple silicon Macs pair the chip with fast internal SSDs. For an archive utility, the disk is often the bottleneck; on these Macs, compression speed becomes the limit more often than reading and writing.

One architecture to test. A developer supporting both Intel and Apple silicon must build, test and fix bugs on both. A small team shipping only Apple silicon can put all of that effort into one platform.

Why some utilities are Apple silicon only

This is a trade-off, and it has a cost to people with Intel Macs. The reasons developers make it:

• Every Mac sold for several years has been Apple silicon, and the Intel share of active Macs shrinks every year.
• Testing on one architecture means fewer untested code paths and fewer bugs that only appear on one machine.
• Some frameworks and optimisations are Apple-silicon specific, or perform very differently on Intel.
• macOS itself is ending Intel support, so new software built for Intel now has a short remaining life.

For someone on an Intel Mac, that means some new utilities are unavailable. That is a real loss, and a developer that makes the choice should state it clearly on the product page and the store listing, rather than leaving you to discover it after purchase.

Choosing utilities on an Apple silicon Mac

• Prefer native or universal apps, especially for anything that runs in the background.
• Check the Kind in Get Info before relying on an older utility.
• Watch Activity Monitor's Energy tab for background apps that use more than their job needs.
• Replace abandoned Intel-only tools before Rosetta stops being an option, not after.

Where Ziploom sits

Ziploom is built for Apple silicon Macs only, and says so on its product page and in its App Store listing. If you use an Intel Mac, it will not run — Finder's Compress, the ditto and tar commands, or another archive tool are the options there.

On Apple silicon, it creates ZIP and 7Z archives and extracts RAR, ZIP and 7Z, with optional password support. It shows progress on large jobs, lets you choose how existing destinations are handled, and reveals output in Finder. Before extraction, safety checks cover unsafe paths, symbolic links, suspicious compression ratios, oversized jobs and available disk space. It does not create RAR.

All archive processing stays on your Mac, with no accounts, analytics, advertising, telemetry or network features.