Last I heard, TurboTax does *not* natively support Apple Silicon Macs, the *only* kind they now sell. No, I don't want to download Rosetta. I remember seeing a System Requirements page that listed Intel Mac as a requirement, but don't see that here: https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/cd-download/tta-system-requirements. Does anyone know if they've addressed the issue for new Macs?
A sure-fire way to see if they support the Apple Silicon architecture is to find the Turbotax app and executable, and in a Terminal window run the 'file' utility on it, looking to see if it supports the 'arm64' architecture. For instance, this command demonstrates that Quicken supports both 'arm64' and 'x86_64' (Intel 64 bit chips):
> file /Applications/Quicken.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicken
/Applications/Quicken.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicken: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64:Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64]
/Applications/Quicken.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicken (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
/Applications/Quicken.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicken (for architecture arm64:( Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64
I'm thinking if the Quicken folks can figure it out the TurboTax developers should be able to do it, but the System Requirements statement isn't explicit about that.
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Looks to me like still not Apple Silicon, since in the System Report / Applications, it shows "Intel". Just unacceptable after all these years. You can really the effects in the sluggish performance of the program.
TurboTax 2024:
Version: 2024.r17.020
Obtained from: Identified Developer
Last Modified: 2/6/25, 04:55
Kind: Intel
Signed by: Developer ID Application: Intuit Inc. (G4SSPX3CBL), Developer ID Certification Authority, Apple Root CA
Location: /Applications/TurboTax 2024.app
I am running TT 2024 on Mac Mini M4 with Mac OS 15, seems fine. Note Mac OS 12 and below no longer supported that's probably a bigger issue for aging Intel Macs that stop at older OS levels.
Thanks for the reply, but did you ever install Rosetta? (Desired answer: "no".)
Did you try the Terminal command 'file' I mentioned?
I bought the Desktop product a couple of years ago and found it unusable and not returnable. Trying to avoid that situation again.
No Rosetta. Hard to know what issue you had previously, but I jumped from 2015 Intel iMac/Macbook on MacOS 11/12, to Mac Mini M4 for 2024 so I don't have extensive experience running TT on Apple silicon in prior years. Here's the output of file command:
/Applications/TurboTax 2024.app/Contents/MacOS/TurboTax 2024: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
Probably the bigger issue for folks is going to be MacOS version compatibility, TT 2024 is only supported on MacOS v13 onwards and a lot of older Macs from 2015/6 or so will be starting to age out of OS upgrades needed to run TT.
If you've not purchased it yet check prices on Amazon it's nicely discounted there at the moment.
Hmm. The 'x86_64' output says it will run on 64-bit Intel processors. If there were another line containing 'arm' then we'd know that it can also run natively on Apple Silicon. (A brilliant bit of engineering that allows different CPU's to be supported by the same binary file.). So I'm inferring that you have Rosetta on your M4, which is something I want to avoid. Thanks for clarifying.
(The knocks on Rosetta are (a) poor performance and (b) excessive number of SSD writes, which cuts into the lifetime of the hard-wired SSD drive. https://redd.it/luyim1)
ok but now I'm interested in how this is working if you're saying this binary shouldn't run on Apple Silicon without some sort of emulator. It's a brand new M4, I did not use MA or TM to migrate stuff from my old iMac. The only things I've installed on it (to my knowledge) are Adobe Creative Cloud/Lightroom/Photoshop, Audacity, TurboTax 2023, TurboTax 2024, BackBlaze, GoodSync, Microsoft 365. Did one of these install something to enable TT? I don't see any "rosetta" processes running in Activity Monitor.
correction, there is this process
441 798 1 0 29Dec24 ?? 0:00.13 /usr/libexec/rosetta/oahd
installed 11/15 so presumably comes with the OS
Yes, curious. In Activity Monitor, look for something besides 'Apple' in the 'kind' column. Easiest way might be to sort on the 'kind' column and look at the top and bottom of the process list. I don't know what Rosetta looks like in Activity Monitor, but the 'kind' column would be another way of identifying non-native apps.
Edit: you've identified the Rosetta process.
Looks to me like still not Apple Silicon, since in the System Report / Applications, it shows "Intel". Just unacceptable after all these years. You can really the effects in the sluggish performance of the program.
TurboTax 2024:
Version: 2024.r17.020
Obtained from: Identified Developer
Last Modified: 2/6/25, 04:55
Kind: Intel
Signed by: Developer ID Application: Intuit Inc. (G4SSPX3CBL), Developer ID Certification Authority, Apple Root CA
Location: /Applications/TurboTax 2024.app
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