Universal and Native Apple Silicon Apps

[lucas3d]

Viscosity 1.9 (Universal)

Viscosity For Mac & Windows: Version 1.9 - SparkLabs

www.sparklabs.com

 

[roland.g]

Kind of sad that Clean My Mac did not get a dev unit and have their software ready at launch.

 

[bhaveshp]

Quicken 6.0

Quicken 6.0 Apple Silicon & Big Sur Press Release

 

[lucas3d]

Delete

 

[09872738]

Accelerating TensorFlow Performance on Mac

Accelerating TensorFlow 2 performance on Mac

blog.tensorflow.org

View attachment 1672980

Interesting... I wasn't aware Tensorflow supports Metal. Or how is it accelerated on non-Nvidia machines?

 

[felix_schwarz]

Remote Buddy 2.0 also runs native on Apple Silicon:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1326697861329920001

The Big Sur and Apple Silicon update

Remote Buddy 2.0 Public Beta now supports Big Sur and runs natively on Apple silicon Macs.

www.iospirit.com

 

[iyordanov]

Adding to the list - MoneyWiz 2020 is also a universal app. (www.wiz.money)

 

[Icelus]

Interesting... I wasn't aware Tensorflow supports Metal. Or how is it accelerated on non-Nvidia machines?

Version 2.4 supports ML Compute (Big Sur), so it is up to macOS how this is implemented per system.

Leveraging ML Compute for Accelerated Training on Mac

Update: You can now leverage Apple’s tensorflow-metal PluggableDevice in TensorFlow v2.5 for accelerated training on Mac GPUs directly with…

machinelearning.apple.com

 

[RobbieTT]

@arn

Edited the wiki to add Amphetamine, Automator & EtreCheck.

Automator requires a little more explanation though:

- Not currently showing on Apple Support as a Big Sur Universal App - but it is
- Will show in System Information as 'Intel' if any Automator created apps have been ported from an Intel Mac
- The simple act of using Automator to open and save an existing Automator created app on an M1 system will convert it to 'Universal'

The wiki has been really helpful - especially as checking for updates via the Mac App Store can show 'up-to-date' even when a new Universal version has been released. An epic fail by Apple.

Anyway - thanks Arn!

 

[GeorgeZengobi]

Curio from Zengobi is now a universal app.

 

[ablatt]

Sorry for asking what might be a stupid question, but on page 1 what is the difference between Universal apps and 'Apple Silicon only' apps? I thought all apps that support Apple Silicon natively are also Universal.

 

[RobbieTT]

Sorry for asking what might be a stupid question, but on page 1 what is the difference between Universal apps and 'Apple Silicon only' apps? I thought all apps that support Apple Silicon natively are also Universal.

It's not a daft question and for the moment most new consumer apps will be universal, so will work on both, but with a trend-line to becoming AS-only at some point.

There are some apps that are AS only, right from the go (eg Rosetta 2) and clearly native iOS apps that can run on AS will not be universal either. Some developers may also wish to keep their products distinct between AS and Intel and there will be AS-only apps that only exist to take advantage of the capabilities provided by the AS chipsets (eg machine learning / neural network stuff).

It is a new way of working so no, not a daft question at all. Extract below from my M1 Mac mini, showing Apple Silicon, Intel, Other and Universal applications installed:

😊

 

[walterpaisley]

I added a bunch of apps but forgot to post the additions here, so here they are:

Bartender
CleanShot X
Google Chrome Dev / Canary
Karabiner Elements
mmhmm
PixelSnap
Reeder
Rocket
Screens

Protip: if you want to see what apps are universal on your system launch System Information, go to Applications, and then sort by "Unidentified Developer". It'll group all of the third-party apps together so you can easily see what's compiled as a Universal binary.

 

[KeepItSecret]

Hey, @neilio could you please add a TextSniper as well?

 

[polaris20]

According to Pixelmator's Team e-mail:


BTW if someone is interested buying it (as me), and is a Pixelmator owner (the first one), search for "Pixelmator Pru - Upgrade bundle" in App Store. If you own Pixelmator in your account, Pixelmator Pro gets much cheaper.

Well that's fantastic. Very kind of them to do it as a free upgrade; they could have easily launched it as a separate, new app. LOVE Pixelmator Pro, and Pixelmator on iPadOS, as well as Pixelmator Photo!! I use them all quite regularly. I wonder if they're going to do Photo on MacOS, now that it's Apple Silicon? Then I could use it for organization and batch processing there too.

 

[nickjd331]

Icon Resizer is Universal
as is The Random Number Generator

Also @Shivetya :
On the Big Sur System Report you can see which apps are universal and which are Intel only. (Apple Menu > About This Mac > System Report > Applications)

 

[mikeboss]

Downie 4

Downie - YouTube Video Downloader for macOS - Charlie Monroe Software

Video downloader for macOS with support for YouTube and other 1200 sites.

software.charliemonroe.net

 

[cal6n]

There’s an old thread on GitHub reporting that Audacity works just fine via Rosetta.

Apple Silicon Support · Issue #684 · audacity/audacity

With Apple possibly dropping the first Apple Silicon powered Mac as early as November what's the status of Audacity support for ARM-based Macs? From what I've seen on other OSS projects they are ba...

github.com

 

[mcvaughan]

Does anyone know if Workspace ONE (AirWatch) MDM works on Apple Silicon?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

as long as you do your research on the software you use daily. for now there are only a handful of software natively supported.

Non-native apps are, by and large, blindingly fast. Rosetta 2 isn't "emulating Intel instructions in real time" the way Rosetta 1 did for PowerPC. It's translating the code at either install or first run, so that the code it sees the app will run will, for all future runs, use actual ARM code when possible.

As an example, I used the latest beta of Handbrake to transcode a 4K/60fps ProRes file to HVEC using the software x265 transcoder. (So neither machine would use the T2 or M1 chip's built-in HVEC encoder.)

My 2019 16" MacBook Pro with 45W 8-core Core i9-9880H CPU completed the transcode at the speed of 11.1 fps.

My M1 Mac Mini, running Intel code through Rosetta 2, did it at a speed of 8.9 fps. In a CPU that is supposedly only 20W.

(There's something wrong with the x265 encoder running ARM-native code, it produces a file FAR larger from the same settings, taking 3 times as long as running in Rosetta mode, so I can't compare to ARM-native.)

Oh, and using the "VideoToolbox" encoder, which uses the hardware HVEC encoders on both, goes at about 45 fps on both. Although it produces a file about twice as large, so it's not quite as efficient. (It gets the same because the HVEC encoder in the M1 is probably the same as in the Intel system's T2 chip.)

 

[Anonymous Freak]

I really hope Big Sur has a tool or means to identify apps on our current Intel machines that it can work with

Every app that isn't a virtualization app should work.

That said, I tried a virtualization app, and Big Sur happily ran it with no warnings.

Then it crashed my Mac when I tried to actually do some virtualization. (The UI worked fine, it was when I launched the VM it broke.)

Edit: I should specify - if you load an app *NOT* through the App Store, there is no warning. The App Store simply doesn't let you install them. (The App Store version of Parallels Desktop, for example, doesn't even show up when I search for it, but when I look at "my purchases", I see it, but can't download it.)

 

[ubercool]

The master list is missing a bunch of universal apps for writers and book publishing:

iA Writer
Scrivener
Ulysses
Vellum

😀

 

[Zazoh]

Every app that isn't a virtualization app should work.

That said, I tried a virtualization app, and Big Sur happily ran it with no warnings.

Then it crashed my Mac when I tried to actually do some virtualization. (The UI worked fine, it was when I launched the VM it broke.)

Edit: I should specify - if you load an app *NOT* through the App Store, there is no warning. The App Store simply doesn't let you install them. (The App Store version of Parallels Desktop, for example, doesn't even show up when I search for it, but when I look at "my purchases", I see it, but can't download it.)

I‘m confused by your edit. I downloaded Zoom from the Zoom website, and when installing I was notified Rosetta2 was needed and it installed. Then when I downloaded VM Ware Horizon, it just installed. Both apps run as Intel in activity monitor.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Yes, VM apps will run, but only the user interface. The actual virtualization won't work. For me, CrossOver Mac ran its UI fine, but the moment it tried to run Windows code, my M1 Mac instantly rebooted.

Parallels Desktop, again, the UI will run, but as soon as I try launching a VM, the app crashes (doesn't take down the whole OS, thankfully!)

Non-virtual-machine Intel apps should run just fine. The "user interface" parts of virtual-machine apps should even run just fine. It's the actual virtualization that won't work.

 

[0924487]

with the exception of apple software then. Office is a given; it's not a cpu intensive task and it'd probably work fine with emulation. I mean yeah productive was not the right word; I'm thinking of a cpu-intensive powerhouse like for video, audio; design...; those things people often buy macs for. I'm not saying you can't be "productive" using just a browser and a text editor (I mean personnaly for those things I'd buy a refurbed air from a few years back but that's just me)

Most professional engineering software are not available on any Macs anyway. Apple definitely used Windows to design the M1 and all other A-series chips. Even Autodesk Inventor is Windows only.