Unity working on new M1 chip ? (looking at Macbook Air)

[matrixsc]

Hello


I'm looking at buying my Son a Macbook Air. This will be for homework and coding as he does enjoy using Unity( app) on his iphone, And at the moment he is using a 9 year old laptop to do work on and use the Unity program for coding on .

I'm pretty sure the Macbook Air will be fine for all his own work and studies but i'm worried that unity won't work yet as i did read there might be issue with the M1 chip ?

Hoping someone here might be able to help me and let me know please .


Thank you

 

[Dorje Sylas]

Could you link to the "Unity" iOS you're referencing?

If by chance you are talking about Unity by Unity Technologies, there is an ongoing discussion about exactly that. The current answer seems to be "works okay through Rosetta 2" with Unity 2020.

Your son may want to keep track of the MacOS Unity forum since issues with Big Sur and the M1 will likely show up there. Heads of Technology had it up and running with the My First Lego Game (Video at time stamp).

I'm waiting for some more feedback, but at some point I'll have to put in to my boss to order a new development Mini M1, so we can do M1 binaries of our stuff. Our 2018 testing MacMini is too weak to run Unity for builds, and our actual Dev Mac is quite old.

Personally I'd be worried about any heavy development on a MacBook Air. I've personally never trusted Apple's cooling designs, and the lack of fans in the Air trips all my warning flags. Apple keeps trying to do passive cooling on stuff, and its historically gone badly. The Pro that Heads of Technology was using hit 110 F (43.5 C), and you can hear the fans going. You'll likely want to look at some kind of force airflow cooling pad.

 

[matrixsc]

Could you link to the "Unity" iOS you're referencing?

If by chance you are talking about Unity by Unity Technologies, there is an ongoing discussion about exactly that. The current answer seems to be "works okay through Rosetta 2" with Unity 2020.

Your son may want to keep track of the MacOS Unity forum since issues with Big Sur and the M1 will likely show up there. Heads of Technology had it up and running with the My First Lego Game (Video at time stamp).

I'm waiting for some more feedback, but at some point I'll have to put in to my boss to order a new development Mini M1, so we can do M1 binaries of our stuff. Our 2018 testing MacMini is too weak to run Unity for builds, and our actual Dev Mac is quite old.

Personally I'd be worried about any heavy development on a MacBook Air. I've personally never trusted Apple's cooling designs, and the lack of fans in the Air trips all my warning flags. Apple keeps trying to do passive cooling on stuff, and its historically gone badly. The Pro that Heads of Technology was using hit 110 F (43.5 C), and you can hear the fans going. You'll likely want to look at some kind of force airflow cooling pad.

Hi

Thanks for your reply .

My lad uses Mimo the app on his iphone :- https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/mimo-learn-to-code-program/id1133960732

And for the laptop he used Unity here and downloaded the set up file https://store.unity.com/download-nuo

Mostly it will be for homework though and him dabbling in the coding and learning it more .


Thank you

 

[SuperMikey]

Hi,
Unity is working fine* for me! I'm running version 2020.2.0b12, on an 8gb M1 MBP.

It comes with a default option to install Visual Studio - so I would expect that to work, I haven't tried it however as I installed Visual Studio Code, which is working exactly as it did on my 2015 Intel MBP.

The Unity Editor, while not lightning quick, is still pretty zippy, and faster than on my old MBP - which is pretty impressive considering it's using Rosetta 2! I've only had it crash once in 2 days so far.

I've been running the editor for about 5 hours today, and the keyboard is 'warm', but I can't hear the fan if it's on.

Hope that helps.

*The only issue I've actually encountered that could be a problem is building a native/standalone M1 app seems a bit flakey at the moment (ie. they don't run for me) - but they work fine inside the editor, and as you can see from the thread posted above - Unity are working on that.

 

[torncanvas]

You should get 16GB of RAM for Unity. Here’s a test video: