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Apple Silicon

In November 2020, Apple released their first Macintosh computers running custom Apple-designed CPUs instead of the Intel CPUs they had used in the prior decade. These CPUs run an architecture called ARM (Acorn Risc Machine).

What is an architecture?

At the lowest level, the CPU (Central Processing Unit) of a computer uses something called an instruction set to actually do the work of running programs.

In this course, you will learn Ruby and JavaScript, which are both high-level languages.

So you don't have to worry about the instruction set of your CPU, do you?

Not directly, but since there has been more than a decade of Apple computers using the Intel x86 instruction set (sometimes abbreviated x86, x64, x86_64 or i386), much of the software you use hasn't been compiled for the new Apple Silicon architecture called ARM (Acorn Risc Machines, sometimes abbreviated as arm64).

Your Apple Silicon based Mac has a piece of software called Rosetta 2 that will translate x86 instructions into ARM instructions.

Setting up a Rosetta Terminal

  1. Run the following command in your terminal to install Rosetta 2:

    /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

  2. Close the Terminal application.

  3. Locate the Terminal application within the Utilities folder (Finder > Go menu

    Utilities).

  4. Select Terminal.app and right-click on it, then choose Duplicate.

  5. Rename the duplicated Terminal app something obvious and distinct, like Rosetta Terminal.

  6. Right-click on the freshly renamed Rosetta Terminal app and choose Get Info.

  7. Check the box for Open using Rosetta and close the Get Info window.

  8. Make sure you use the Rosetta Terminal going forward, as it will fully support Homebrew and other x86 apps.