Hi everyone,
I’m having trouble opening RStudio on my MacBook Air. Every time I try to launch it, I get an error message saying the “R session failed to start” or something about a path mismatch.
Here are some details about my setup:
• macOS version: 26.0.1 (25A362)
• R version: 4.5.1 for Apple Silicon (M1/M2)
• RStudio version: 2025.09.1+401 (Cucumberleaf Sunflower)
I’ve already tried:
• Reinstalling both R and RStudio
• Following my teacher’s installation steps
• Clicking “Troubleshooting” (but it didn’t respond)
• Even contacting some technicians online, but they couldn’t solve the problem either
Some of my classmates who also use MacBook Airs can install and run RStudio without issues, so I’m wondering if there’s something wrong with my system or settings.
Could anyone please help me figure out what’s going on or guide me through a clean reinstall process?
Can you be a little more specific? What is the EXACT error message?
Thank you. I’ve attached a screenshot of the error message when RStudio fails to start, but I’m not sure what it means.
If you open a terminal and enter:
R --version
what does it return?
wzw@My-MacBook-Air ~ % R --version
R version 4.5.1 (2025-06-13) -- "Great Square Root"
Copyright (C) 2025 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20
R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under the terms of the
GNU General Public License versions 2 or 3.
For more information about these matters see
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
You could try removing these RStudio files
rm -rf ~/.config/rstudio
rm -rf ~/.local/share/rstudio
The session path has changed, but it still doesn't work.
Not sure what this could be, but at this point, I'd try to make a new user account, to rule out that the problem is a user-level setting. Then, after making sure R works in a terminal, I'd install another IDE, like Positron, to see if that works.
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I really appreciate your help!!!!!!! After change to the new account, RStudio is finally working—I was seriously considering buying a new computer! 
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