Why is Dotvault Apple Silicon only?

Dotvault ships as an Apple Silicon build, and there is no Intel version. Apple made that call rather than me: macOS 27 drops Intel Macs, and once the platform vendor stops shipping the OS for a machine, everyone downstream ends up making the same decision anyway — usually later, and with worse timing.

If you are on an Intel Mac, this is the answer you wanted before buying rather than after. An Apple Silicon build will not run on an Intel Mac at all. Not slowly, not with a warning — Rosetta translates Intel code so it runs on Apple Silicon, and it only works in that direction. There is no reverse gear.

If you somehow already have Dotvault on an Intel Mac, it keeps working — nothing reaches into your machine and switches it off. What stops is updates: your install carries on checking, carries on finding nothing, and says nothing about it.

There is a smaller reason underneath the Apple one. Dotvault uses a native module for its local database, and native modules are compiled against a specific ABI. Shipping two architectures meant cross-compiling that module for an architecture that never once ran on the machine doing the building, then signing, notarising and publishing a binary I had no way of executing. That mostly works, and “mostly” was carrying a lot of weight — when it eventually broke it would have broken for exactly the people least able to tell me about it.

I wrote the whole thing up here, including the part where there is no performance win to report and the only thing I actually gained was a shorter build.