like the Answer from Tony mentions, this all affects only the executables. I have not tested it (cause thankfully my macbook is old and hence has enough ports), but I can imagine that the performance of an external drive connected to a shared USB port over an external Dongle or USB hub would suffer when other USB devices also want a piece of the action with the macbook, over that USB port. Macbooks (especially the newer models) have fewer ports (USB, SDCard, etc). Depends on how you feel about that viz-e-viz security, app-verification, etc. You can still go to the Settings->Security/Privacy->General and launch the app anyway though. (Convenience factor?)įor some apps, even on an HFS+/APFS formatted disk, the macos throws an error that the app cannot be verified. You can use the apps only as long as you have the external drive.

The following are not deal breakers and are self-obvious but just to be complete: So you earn next to nothing from using an external drive for such apps. Microsoft Visual Studio), they still install 90% of their stuff onto the main drive where macOS resides. Some apps, even though they may say that they have an 'installation path' option (e.g. Those often want to install themselves on the disk where the macOS itself also resides (e.g. often the ones where the setup comes with. apps applications which you can just drag and drop out of your Applications folder onto an external drive, some apps have installers instead (e.g. Those updates may or may not land in the Application folder on the main mac drive (and not the external drive).

If you try to run those external apps from an exFAT or some other non-Apple/non-Mac file system, macOS will complain about a 'corrupt or broken' app, even though the app itself would be totally fine.īe careful when the apps on the external drive want to self-update.

The external drive must be formatted in some Apple/Mac Filesystem like HFS+ or APFS.

Sync programs mac external drives