A HoudahSpot user recently wrote in with a question that probably sounds familiar if you’ve upgraded to the macOS Tahoe 26.5:
“Using HoudahSpot, is there a way to search for Intel-based applications on my Mac? Upon opening one, I’ve been getting notifications that these apps will no longer work in an upcoming upgrade when Rosetta is discontinued.”
Good question — and yes, HoudahSpot can do exactly that.
What the warning means
When you open an application that was compiled only for Intel processors, macOS Tahoe shows a warning. The message says the app won’t be supported in the next major version of macOS, because that version will no longer include Rosetta 2.
Rosetta 2 is the translation layer that lets Apple Silicon Macs run software originally built for Intel. It has been part of macOS since the first M1 Macs shipped in 2020. But Apple announced it won’t last forever — and macOS Tahoe is sending the first clear signals that the end is near.
The problem with relying on those warnings is that you only see them when you actually open an app. If you have old utilities buried in your Applications folder that you haven’t launched in months, you won’t find out until it’s too late.
What macOS knows about your apps
macOS Spotlight indexes applications on your Mac, including a metadata field called Executable Architecture. For most modern apps, that list includes both arm64 (Apple Silicon) and x86_64 (Intel). Some older apps list only x86_64, or possibly i386 for 32-bit Intel apps from even longer ago.
The search you want is simple: find applications where arm64 is not in the list of architectures. Those are the apps that currently depend on Rosetta.
Building the search in HoudahSpot
Start with a fresh HoudahSpot search window.
Set the location. Change the search location to “Local volumes + user home”. This covers your main disk and home folder — the places where applications typically live.
Add the Content Kind criterion – reuse the one that is part of your default search setup. In the Refine pane, set the first criterion to “Content Kind” “is” “Application”. This limits the results to apps.
Add the Executable Architecture criterion. Open the Search menu, choose Add Criterion → Add Other…, and find “Executable Architecture” in the list. Set it to “is” “arm64”.
Negate it with a None group. Here’s the step that turns the search around. Option-click the Executable Architecture criterion to select it, then open the Search menu and choose Add Group → Nest in “None” group. The criterion moves inside a group that reads “None of the following are true.”
This is the key move. It turns “has arm64” into “does not have arm64”. An application matches when none of its listed architectures is arm64 — which is exactly the condition you’re looking for.
Run the search. The results are your compatibility list.
What to do with the results
Go through the list and decide on a case-by-case basis. Some apps will have updates available — check the developer’s website or the Mac App Store. Others may be abandonware that you can simply delete. A few might be tools you still rely on, in which case you’ll want to find alternatives before the next major macOS release arrives (macOS updates typically ship in the fall).
A few things the search won’t catch
The search covers applications that Spotlight has indexed. A few edge cases fall outside its reach:
- System locations excluded from indexing. Some support tools install themselves in protected folders that Spotlight doesn’t index.
- Helper tools inside app bundles. An
.apppackage can contain internal helper executables. Those won’t appear as separate search results. That said, if a developer went to the effort of supporting Apple Silicon in the main app, they almost certainly did the same for any helpers. - Command-line tools. If you’ve installed software via Homebrew or other package managers, those binaries won’t appear in this search. That’s a separate problem for a different day.
Why HoudahSpot may have triggered the warning
Some HoudahSpot users have seen the macOS Tahoe warning about Apple Silicon support — even though HoudahSpot 6.8 fully supports Apple Silicon.
Here’s what’s happening. HoudahSpot bundles two versions of a helper called TextContentService: one compiled for Apple Silicon (TextContentService-arm64.xpc) and one for Intel (TextContentService-x86-64.xpc). The Intel version is there for a specific reason: HoudahSpot can load Spotlight importer plug-ins, and some of those plug-ins haven’t been updated for Apple Silicon yet. When HoudahSpot encounters one of those older importers, it needs the Intel helper — and Rosetta — to run it.
macOS sees that Intel binary inside the HoudahSpot bundle and triggers the warning. But HoudahSpot itself runs natively on Apple Silicon. The warning is technically accurate but misleading in context.
Once Rosetta is discontinued, HoudahSpot will simply stop loading those Intel importers. The TextContentService-x86-64.xpcfile will sit there taking up about 76 KB of disk space, doing nothing. No real harm done.
If you ran the HoudahSpot search above and found HoudahSpot in the results — that’s why. You can set it aside. HoudahSpot is ready for whatever comes next.
HoudahSpot is a powerful file search tool for Mac. Download a free trial and see what your Spotlight index actually contains.