No posts have given me a solution to this… I just got a new MacBook Air M4 and Anki did not open (was on Sequoia). I upgraded to Tahoe thinking that it’d work then, but it I use the launcher and then Anki closes. Is there some solution to this?
For troubleshooting the issue, perhaps try running /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/MacOS/launcher directly in Terminal to see if any error messages are displayed?
When I run it, I see:
% /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/MacOS/launcher
Starting Anki 25.09.2...
2025-10-08 20:41:44,244:INFO:aqt.mediasrv: Serving on http://127.0.0.1:60980
Starting main loop...
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X@MacBook-Air ~ % /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/MacOS/launcher
Error: Failed to execute: /Users/X/Library/Application Support/AnkiProgramFiles/.venv/bin/python -c import aqt, sys; sys.argv[0] = ‘Anki’; aqt.run(): Bad CPU type in executable (os error 86)
Press enter to close…
This probably means you are running the wrong binary. Binaries are specific to CPU architectures and your CPU isn’t supported by that specific binary. On my linux system, I can see two versions of the launcher (and of uv), amd64 and arm64. I’m assuming you tried to run the wrong one.
I don’t have a mac so cannot check; but you should find the specific launcher files somewhere in the program folder (Managing Files - Anki Manual). Maybe you can ls it to show it’s contents and check if there are mulitple launcher files? You can also check what exactly that launcher file is that you’re trying to execute. It might not be the binary, but a shell script instead. If it’s a script, it’ll tell you which binary it tries to execute (if you open and read it). Then, try to run the correct launcher from the directory based on that.
Thanks all. I ended up using ChatGPT and asked it for what to send to fix it… I think it needed Rosetta or something downloaded? Anyways, thanks all for the help.
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