Download — [verified] Catalina On M1 Mac

While you can download the Catalina installer on an M1 Mac to create a bootable USB for other Intel-based Macs, you cannot run it on the M1 itself.

It is to natively download and install macOS Catalina (10.15) on an M1 Mac . Because Apple Silicon uses the ARM architecture and Catalina was built exclusively for Intel (x86) processors, the operating system lacks the necessary code to run on M1 hardware. Additionally, Apple does not allow Macs to boot into an OS version older than the one they shipped with; since M1 Macs debuted with macOS Big Sur , they cannot "downgrade" to Catalina. Why Catalina Won't Run on M1 download catalina on m1 mac