The state of M1 software

Apple’s pivot to its own silicon forced every developer to rebuild their apps. Let’s check in and see how the transition is going

Apple’s pivot to its own silicon forced every developer to rebuild their apps. Let’s check in and see how the transition is going six months on.

It’s now been six months since Apple shook up the personal computing world with its own processors. The launch of the M1powered MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini was a dramatic moment for the company because it marked the transition away from Intel’s chip architecture and on to silicon of Apple’s own design, based on the ARM chipset.

In other words: all existing software written for the Mac will no longer run natively on any new Mac that Apple releases. This means that if developers want their software to work on the new machines, they will ultimately have to rebuild them for the new architecture.

So, half a year on, we think it’s time to check in and see how the transition is going.

The PowerPC principle

When Apple made a similar transition from PowerPC architecture to Intel in 2006, the process was dogged by compatibility issues. Now that the company has done it again, is all of the software we need compatible with Apple Silicon? The good news is that, by and large, the answer is “yes”.

Many of the most popular apps have already made the leap to native M1 compatibility. In addition to Apple’s entire suite of apps, Google Chrome, Slack, Twitter and Zoom are all compatible. Even by the middle of December 2020, Microsoft had released new versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint for the M1. And although it is still technically in beta, Adobe has released an M1-native version of Photoshop to Creative Cloud customers.

There are, however, still significant gaps in the catalogue. This isn’t as bad as it may seem, thanks to Apple’s “Rosetta 2” emulation software, which on-the-fly converts Intel Mac apps to work on Apple Silicon. By all accounts, it has done so incredibly successfully, but it still isn’t ideal. Intel apps running under Rosetta draw on more system resources and there are many major apps in this category, including Microsoft Teams and OneDrive, Discord, Google Drive, Webex, Spotify and the vast majority of Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps.

Unfortunately for M1 early adopters, there are still some apps that neither work natively on the M1 nor under Rosetta 2, meaning that there’s no way to run them on the new machines. Most notably this includes Avast Antivirus, and lots of configuration software for external peripherals, such as Epson’s scanner software and Logitech’s webcam app.

Developer delight

When the M1 machines first launched, one early stumbling block appeared to be developer tools. Some of the standard apps in a developer’s arsenal weren’t fully ready, which made both writing software for and on the M1 rather tricky.

However, it seems those early frustrations have been eliminated.

“By and large it’s been good because it’s so fast and the battery never runs out,” explained Sam Strachan, who develops software for Debian servers on his M1 Mac.

The same was true for Ben Bird, the developer of SecuritySpy, a Mac app for viewing CCTV cameras. “For me, the transition was remarkably smooth considering the complete shift in underlying architecture”, he told PC Pro.

Bird did hit a few stumbling blocks, though. “The main issue I had was compiling certain open-source libraries,” he said, pointing at the likes of OpenSSL, libcurl and HTTP2, which are widely used components in countless other apps. Consequently, all he could do was wait for the developers of those libraries to update them for the M1 before he could update his own app. Fortunately, in his case, this was fairly swift, and he remains upbeat.

“All my own code basically just compiled for Apple Silicon with just a few minor tweaks, which was very impressive,” he said. “[It’s been] far less painful than the last major architecture transition from PowerPC to Intel.”

What about Windows?

So is there anything that the M1toting Macs can’t do now? Perhaps the biggest remaining major sore spot is the ability to run Windows. Intel Macs could dual-boot Windows with ease, which was particularly useful for developers who were building apps for multiple platforms, as well as for gamers looking to play more than just casual games.

The good news is that there’s some hope that, as Apple Silicon is based on ARM chips, one day it will be as easy to dual-boot Apple Silicon machines with the ARM version of Windows that’s used on devices such as the Surface Pro X.

Even if that does happen, let’s not forget that ARM-based Windows has the same challenge as ARM-based Macs – apps will have to be recompiled. Those Intel-based Macs will still have their uses for some time yet.

It’s been far less painful than the last major architecture transition from PowerPC to Intel