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Power PC Apps on intel Mac?

I've been TRYING to open OLD Claris & AppleWorks files on my intel Mac (Mini, late 2012)... Searched through tons of support articles and finally found out that AppleWorks 6.2.9 (or 6.2.4) should work. When I try to open AW (.9) I get a dialogue box saying Power PC apps are no longer supported on intel Macs.

Is it possible to open "Power PC" Apps on an intel Mac?

Mac mini, macOS 10.14

Posted on Oct 24, 2020 11:56 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 24, 2020 12:09 PM

No. Different CPU architecture.


PowerPC apps do not run on Intel processors, unless the operating system is macOS Snow Leopard (10.6.8) that automatically detected the PowerPC code and ran those applications in the Rosetta emulation software. Apple dropped Rosetta starting with OS X Lion (10.7). Although Apple has now reintroduced Rosetta2 for Big Sur, it is for the Intel architecture only.


If you could find a server version of OS X Snow Leopard on Ebay (Apple no longer sells the media), you could install that operating system in Parallels Desktop Virtual Machine, update it to 10.6.8, and after also installing AppleWorks 6.2.9 in the Snow Leopard guest, then you could run AppleWorks as before.


LibreOffice can open most AppleWorks documents but certainly not as correctly as AppleWorks itself.


The last Apple Application suite that could open uncomplicated AppleWorks docuents was the iWork '09 Suite, which only runs on Mojave 10.14.4 - 10.14.6, or 10.13.6 and earlier. It is a 32-bit application suite and is inoperable on Catalina.

3 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 24, 2020 12:09 PM in response to George OB

No. Different CPU architecture.


PowerPC apps do not run on Intel processors, unless the operating system is macOS Snow Leopard (10.6.8) that automatically detected the PowerPC code and ran those applications in the Rosetta emulation software. Apple dropped Rosetta starting with OS X Lion (10.7). Although Apple has now reintroduced Rosetta2 for Big Sur, it is for the Intel architecture only.


If you could find a server version of OS X Snow Leopard on Ebay (Apple no longer sells the media), you could install that operating system in Parallels Desktop Virtual Machine, update it to 10.6.8, and after also installing AppleWorks 6.2.9 in the Snow Leopard guest, then you could run AppleWorks as before.


LibreOffice can open most AppleWorks documents but certainly not as correctly as AppleWorks itself.


The last Apple Application suite that could open uncomplicated AppleWorks docuents was the iWork '09 Suite, which only runs on Mojave 10.14.4 - 10.14.6, or 10.13.6 and earlier. It is a 32-bit application suite and is inoperable on Catalina.

Oct 24, 2020 4:17 PM in response to George OB

Once you install the iWork '09 apps from their non-trial DVD, you will want to update them to their latest versions using the iWork Update 9.3. These were the last 12/2012 updates. If the AppleWorks documents are a mix of word processing, spreadsheet, etc. then Pages '09, Numbers '09, and Keynote '09 may have issues opening them as you would expect in AppleWorks.

Power PC Apps on intel Mac?

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