Apple Silicon M1 Macs Compatibility

Most new Macs are coming with the new Apple Silicon M1 chips. This move away from Intel chips to Apple's own ARM chip creates an incompatibility for several applications.

Details

Apple does provide an emulator called Rosetta 2 which can run many of the applications that have not been written for ARM chips yet, but it will run a little slower (although the large increase in speeds provided by these chips makes this less noticeable) and there are some applications that do not run properly even with emulation.

We will update the list below with our testing results for University apps, but for other software https://doesitarm.com/ has a good community sourced listing of what runs natively, what runs in Rosetta 2, and what does not run on the M1 Macs for many commonly used applications. 

 

  1. Apps that run natively on Apple M1 chips

  • Microsoft Office 365 
  • Requires v16.44+, but our current deployment is still at 16.41.
  • Microsoft Edge
  • FireFox v84+
  • Python v2.7.16, v 3.8.2, v3.9
    • Python 2.7 has been deprecated and replaced with 3, and Big Sur does not have python installed by default.
  • Blender
    • *cycles rendering using GPU not supported
  • Atom
  • BBEdit
  • Electron
  • FileZilla
  • Git
  • GitHub Desktop
  • XCode
  • Handbrake v1.4.0
  • Chrome v87

  1. Apps that can run on M1 Mac using Rosetta 2

  • sudo softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license
  • Rosetta 2 is not installed by default, in order to install Rosetta 2, run the following in Terminal with an admin account:
  • With Universal coded applications, macOS will run the ARM version by default.
    • If the Arm version is a little buggy and you want to tell macOS to run using Rosetta 2 instead,
    • right-click on the application and select Get Info.
    • Under General, check the box for Open Using Rosetta.

Get Info window with Open using Rosetta checkbox checked.

  • MySQL Workbench
  • Unity
  • VS Code -
    • native support available on insider build
  • Wireshark
  • IBM SPSS
  • MatLab
  • RStudio
  • Audacity
  • Inkscape
  • Autodesk Fusion 360
  • Autodesk Maya
  • Sketchup

  1. Apps that currently are incompatible with M1 Macs

  • Parallels, VMware Fusion, and other virtualization software cannot run Windows VMs.
    • They can still run Mac and Linux VMs though.
  • Boot Camp is deprecated on M1 Macs.
  • Box Drive -
    • currently in development though
  • Bash -
    • not yet, support in progress
  • Tensor Flow
  • openjdk - 
    • not yet, support in progress

Environment

  • Apple

  • Mac Silicon M1 Chip

  • Applications

  • Software

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