R on macOS Apple Silicon: stats and utils fail to load at startup, IDEs won’t launch

RStudio IDE
1

Hi everyone,

I’m using a university MacBook Air with Apple Silicon (M4) and recently installed R 4.4.3 arm64 from CRAN. Here’s the situation:

1. R installation:

  • Removed all old Intel R and RStudio installations from Mac Intel.
  • Reinstalled R arm64 from CRAN official installer.
  • .libPaths() points correctly to /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/library.
  1. Problem at startup in terminal R:
During startup - Warning messages:
1: package ‘utils’ in options("defaultPackages") was not found 
2: package ‘stats’ in options("defaultPackages") was not found
  • getOption("defaultPackages") shows: "datasets" "utils" "grDevices" "graphics" "stats" "methods".
  • library(stats) and library(utils) work manually in R terminal without errors.
  1. Problem with IDEs:
  • RStudio / VS Code / radian will not start because they rely on automatic loading of default packages.
  1. Other details:
  • All old R folders were removed, and caches cleared (~/Library/Caches/R, ~/R_libs, ~/.R).
  • Only R framework arm64 is installed.

Question:

  • Why do stats and utils fail to load automatically at R startup even with a fresh arm64 installation?
  • How can I fix this so that:
    1. Terminal R starts cleanly without warnings,
    2. IDEs like RStudio or VS Code can launch properly.

Screenshot 2026-02-24 at 1.21.48 PM
Screenshot 2026-02-24 at 1.21.48 PM2300×1660 460 KB

Thanks for any help!

2

Well, this is a very broken installation, so it is quite hard to help you here.

If you have homebrew, you could try this

brew install rig-r
rig ls

and then remove the currently installed versions with

rig rm ...

and install the current R release:

rig add release 
R --version