1. Macbook Pro M1 Virtualbox Windows 10
2. Macbook Pro M1 Virtualbox
3. Macbook Pro M1 Virtualbox App
4. Virtualbox M1 Chip

On November 10th Apple showed us the future of the Mac and released again laptops worth buying. So I bought the 2020 M1 Macbook Air. You will read a review of it soon. If you like the M1, you will also like the M1X, M2 or M3 Macs. No need to rush for last years model, hence why I skipped this one. VirtualBox is an x86 virtualization hypervisor. It only runs on an x86 platform. See While Rosetta 2 will run many x86 apps very well on an M1 Mac, virtualization products are not supported per this Apple document. MacBook Air: MacBook Pro 13 นิ้ว: MacBook Pro 13 นิ้ว MacBook Pro 16 นิ้ว: ซีพียู: Apple M1: Apple M1: Intel Core i5 รุ่นที่ 10.

You unfortunately cannot run VirtualBox on Macs with Apple's M1 chip. No, Boot Camp does not work on the new M1 Macs. Windows used to be installable on Mac through the Boot Camp feature. Since the Mac processor can no longer interpret the Windows operating system, this is.

Ever since I read Kay Singh’s Apple Silicon M1: Black. Magic. Fuckery article, I couldn’t stop wanting one. My 2012 MacBook Air was in need of a replacement, and although still very serviceable for a 8+year old laptop, not upgrading OSX and a shortened battery lifespan were getting irritating. So, Santa (well, you know) bought me a M1 2020 MacBook Air. At first, I wanted to hold off for a while, after many of the developer tools I use were officially supporting ARM64. But hey, what the heck.

As there’s not a lot of information out there on the M1 from a developers perspective, except a fewother blogs here and there, I wanted to chime in and share my initial findings. Bear in mind that this will very likely change in the near future, as many developers are starting to support the new architecture. An interesting site to check whether your software works is isapplesiliconready.com and doesitarm.com - although these are not always up to date and sometimes provides false information! Be sure to go after the source yourself.

Whatever you do, be sure to upgrade Big Sur to 11.1 first - that will take a while (and eat up more HDD space). I went with the 512GB Air version with eight cores. I don’t care about CPU throttling - even with the 25% performance hit, it still outperforms heavyweight Intel MacBook Pros!

Productivity tools

Macbook Pro M1 Virtualbox Windows 10

Before getting to the programming part, let’s take a look at the basic tools I couldn’t live without. First, install iTerm 2. It’s already M1-ready, and Big Sur moved from Bash to Zsh, another good shell I still know from my Gentoo days. Check out technofob.com’s oh-my-zsh config for colors and such, and maybe add extras in your ~.zsh.

Now that you have a shell, we need cmdline stuff. The master branch of Homebrew is ARM64-complaint and you can install two homebrews for the bottles that are still lagging behind - or compile them from source using brew install --build-from-source. I’ve successfully built these from source: sqlite, openssh, python3.9, imagemagick. I set up the M1 homebrew version in /opt/homebrew - and so far, every installation didn’t need a Rosetta alternative - yet. (Heads up: unrar is gone! See link for alternate formula.)

A few other critical pieces of software:

Already running native:

• The Brave nightly build. Most Chromium-based browsers work.
• Rectangle, the upgraded Spectacle one.
• Alfred - of course! I became a convert after fiddling with it, replacing Spotlight and Clipy (see below).

Still on Rosetta - but development on the way:

• Clipy clipboard utility, the upgraded ClipMenu one.
• Hopefully Opera someday soon.
• Sublime Text 3. Preview builds of Visual Studio code are already released.
• Evernote. It runs on Electron, a known-to-be CPU hungry JS shell. The Rosetta one works, but is a bit sluggish and uses a significant amount of battery.
• Update jan. 2021: The latest GIMP 2.10 is finally released for OSX, but there are known Big Sur issues. I didn’t run into a single one.

Update 12 jan. 2021: Sublime Build Systems still use /bin/bash to execute the exec_cmd or cmd commands. This means that your $PATH will be screwed up. There are a couple of options to mitigate this. Fiddling with the internal exec.py file did not work for me. In the end, I simply re-created a .bash_profile file in my home dir to set the path for Sublime Text 3 builds. Using Terminus does not help.

Spotify is a mess, according to some, while others claim that Rosetta is “good enough”. I’d like to run as much stuff as possible native, I guess we’ll have to wait. For now, “it just works”, but as Evernote, is far from optimized.

Java development

The Azul community released ARM64 Java builds that are blazingly fast. There are other solutions, but the Zulu builds I tested so far are great. They even ported the JDK13/JDK11/JDK8 older ones. I settled for v15, since Gradle does not like Java 16 yet, according to the compatibility matrix. Gradle 6.7 builds fine with the ARM64 development kit.

The biggest hurdle for me was JavaFX, the UI libraries we use to teach students the Model-View-Controller principle. It reportedly works under Rosetta, but I wanted to try it native anyway, and got a nice no toolkit found exception, not unlike this one. Funnily enough, it builds fine, but it does not execute: JavaFX looks for a native UI renderer and cannot find one.

Installing JDKs with different architectures turned out not to be problematic, and I can quickly switch between both using an alias:

Paths shouldn’t be hardcoded, but /usr/libexec/java_home -a didn’t work for me. Building this sample FXML project using ./gradlew clean build took about a second natively:

• ARM64: 1378ms
• x86_64 Rosetta2: 9646ms! (second time: 2459ms, still almost double)
• x86_64 MacBook Air 2012: 14590ms (second time: 3200ms)

As you can see, combining Rosetta with another “Virtual” Machine is not a particularly great idea. Remember that the 2012 MacBook Air only has 4GB of memory, with eight year old tech.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans: 12.2 includes Big Sur/Rosetta2 support, but is not running natively. It auto-detects the JDK ARM64 build, which is even more annoying, as setting the default Java Platform is a pain. The “best” way is to manually override netbeans_jdkhome in netbeans.conf. Compared to IntelliJ, NetBeans truly is a piece of shit. Of course, the x86_64 setting also slows down NetBeans itself, not only the project you wish to compile/run.

IntelliJ IDE

IntelliJ: 2020.3 ARM64 test builds are available. It seems that the Rust debugger is not hitting the breakpoints. There’s also a preview PHPStorm build, although I haven’t tried it yet. After opening a Gradle 6.3 project, IntelliJ complains about an invalid Gradle configuration, claiming that JDK15 isn’t compatible with this version of Gradle, although it builds fine on cmdline. Fixing the distribution URL in gradle-wrapper.properties to 6.7.1 does the trick:

After that, the Azul JDK combined with the IntelliJ preview build is a snappy experience and pleasant to work with. Debugging works fine, just as a few third-party libraries I tried - as long as you stay away from JavaFX.

.NET Development

I still need to try this with Rider and Mono. Khalid Abuhakmeh wrote about his experience in a jetbrains blogpost, concluding that it was pleasant to work with .NET on the M1. Bear in mind that he’s talking about Rosetta.

C/C++/Cross-compiling

First, get Xcode from the App Store. Yoink, 12GB!

Next, the CLion IDE: the debugger cannot be launched, official ARM support is currently not there yet, but they’re working on it (last update: 25th of December). One of the perks of being an early adopter, I guess… I don’t want to try this in Rosetta as I only need CLion every odd semester for my teaching activities, and hopefully, by then it’ll be okay.

Until then, I’ll compile and debug cmdline. CMake works flawlessly, using the master version of brew: > Pouring cmake-3.19.2.arm64_big_sur.bottle.tar.gz. Using it to compile the 1.10 release of Google Test gives C++11 errors so you’ll have to add a -DCMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=17 flag to CMake as per this ticket. Compiling itself was extremely quick, compared to what I’m used to on my 2012 MacBook Air.

Game Boy Advance

Cross-compiling GBA stuff using pacman worked flawlessly, obviously in Rosetta mode. I doubt it will ever be released natively. Cross-compiling the whole gba-sprite-library, including four demo projects, took 15343ms. I was surprised that this worked without any problems, and a Rosetta-enabled mGBA happily plays my binaries! On the 2012 laptop, it takes more than twice that long: 32950ms.

Arduino

After finding not so promising Reddit posts, I had to try it out myself. A Github issue tells us Rosetta is supported and “somewhere in the future” native support should be coming - Linux ARM64 builds are already available.

After installing the Arduino IDE (which runs on a JRE, by the way), right-clicking and pressing “Get Info” reveals Kind: Application (Intel). It boots up fairly slowly, but compiling and uploading work without problems. Performance is a non-issue here, you won’t be compiling megabytes of C code anyway.

JavaScript

Node 15.5.0 and its package manager have native bottles uploaded in the master Homebrew repository. Everything works flawlessly after a brew install npm. Do yourself a favor and install a Chromium-based browser to check out Lighthouse.

Go

It’s been a while since I programmed in Go, but Dids created a gist entitled “Compile Go for Apple Silicon (M1)', where he explains how to compile Go natively. I have yet to try it out.

Python

Although python 3.8 comes included with Big Sur, python 3.9 compiled without any issues from source using Homebrew. However, since OSX always seems to come with an annoyingly old 2.7 version, you have to create a symlink in /usr/local/bin to set the default version to 3.9. You may also need to re-link Python:

Writing

Hugo extended works like a charm on ARM64. Pfew!

As for my needed LaTeX tools: the MacTeX about ARM page tells me that full native support will arrive in spring 2021. Until then, Rosetta to the rescue (it also requires 6.7GB…). I do hope that switching will not be problematic, as I can’t wait until then.

As for pandoc that converts my Markdown to LaTeX, compiling from source downloads the x86_64 version of the GHC Haskell compiler. As expected, compilation crashed:

So, I reverted to the x86 installer pkg, which seems to work fine. After the necessary installations, I re-compiled a recently accepted ICSE paper (involving make, pandoc, panflute, pdflatex, bibtex, yaddayadda), and it took 7700ms on the 2012 Air, while the Rosetta x86_64 version took 4447ms. Consider me happy! It will be very interesting to see this number further reduced in spring 2021.

Virtualization

The universal memory structure of the M1 architecture has its advantages, but these obviously fade when dual booting. Furthermore, using something like VirtualBox gets you into further trouble by evenly splitting RAM. It looks like VirtualBox support will never be coming as it requires a x86 CPU.

Alternative options are Parallels, which has a technical preview already published, and VMWare Fusion, which announced on Twitter that they’re working on it.

As of now, there is no possibility for me to run my virtual image of Linux for the Operating Systems course I’m teaching. I guess I’ll be using a Dell laptop for this purpose… I don’t mind, my 2012 MacBook Air didn’t have the required memory to comfortably work with it anyway, so I already resorted to another machine.

Edit 25 jan. 20121: Eleanor pointed me towards a gist to get qemu running on M1. This means it is possible to run Windows 10 and Ubuntu Server on your ARM Mac! On performance: A simple factorial program in ghci is noticeably faster on Ubuntu (ARM64) via qemu than on MacOS via Rosetta. Follow Sevarg’s recent guide to get Ubuntu running under QEmu!

So… Is it worth it?

It depends. If you’re like me, and you have been waiting for a long time to upgrade, now is the best possible time to take the plunge. However, if you already own a more recent MacBook (I hope it’s with a decent keyboard: this one types lovely, compared to my wife’s 2017 butterfly keyboard on the MacBook Pro - what a train-wreck), it might be a better idea to wait half a year.

Currently, with the software I daily use, about 50% of them are running under Rosetta. It is impressive nonetheless: it is seamless and still very fast - except if you’re a Java developer and somehow have to support JavaFX. Don’t forget that the M1 chip comes with other awesome perks:

• 18h battery life (more like 10+ with regular compile jobs, but still great)
• Greatly improved screen compared to my 2012 laptop
• I finally bought a QUERTY one.
• 8GB is more than 4GB.
• We used the 2020 Air to video-call (using browser-based Jitsi) over Christmas, while we used the 2012 Air during Christmas Eve - the fan went on and it crashed once.
• The instant-on effect is amazing, compared to waiting up to ten seconds.
• I can finally play Baldur’s Gate III!

Like Kay said: Black. Magic. Fuckery!

Apple announced the first set of Macs to be powered by the company's new ARM-based M1 system-on-chip (SoC) at its 'One More Thing' event in 2020. The initial lineup of M1 machines were the M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini . At the company's 2021 Spring Loaded event, it unveiled a completely redesigned M1 iMac ..available in seven different colors no less.

At TechRepublic, we've been evaluating the new M1 Macs since release to see how they compare to their Intel-based Mac counterparts and similar Windows PCs. But, should you buy one..for yourself or your business? And, which one should you choose?

As with any business tech purchase, the answer to these questions depends on what the machine will be used for. So, I'm going to break down each machine by the job categories I believe it's best suited for. If I was still working in SMB and enterprise IT, where I started my tech career, this is how I would deploy the M1 iMac, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. Keep in mind, I'm assuming that my company already has the infrastructure in place to support Apple hardware and that the purchase follows our hardware and software procurement policy, i.e. the endusers are either in the queue for a new machine as part of our computer upgrade cycle or we're purchasing new machines to hold for near-term new hires.

Apple's 2020 M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini

TechRepublic Hardware Resources:

Apple iMac (M1 2021)

The 2021 iMac has been completely redesigned around the M1 SoC. The logic board and cooling system has been significantly reduced in size allowing the M1 iMac to have 50% less volume than the previous generation iMac and be only 11.5mm thick. A single glass pane covers the entire front surface and the rear shell has a flat back and rounded corners, which gives the M1 iMac the appearance of super-sized iPad mounted on a tilting stand.

The power cord has been redesigned with a magnetic connection, 2m color-matched, woven cable and external power block similar to those used by MacBook laptops. One new feature on the power block is a Gigabit Ethernet port, which allows the power cable to also serve and the machine's Ethernet connection.

The 2021 M1 iMac comes with a 24-inch 4.5K Retina display and can be configured with a 7-Core GPU or 8-Core GPU variant of the M1 chip, 8GB of 'unified memory' (shared system/video RAM), and 256GB (only available on the 7-Core GPU M1 version) or 512GB SSD storage. The 7-Core GPU model comes with 2x Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports while the 8-Core GPU models come with 2x Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports, 2x USB 3 ports and the Gigabit Ethernet power block. All models have a 1080p FaceTime HD camera. Accessories for the M1 iMac include an updated color-matched Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad and Magic Keyboard. Certain models of the new Magic Keyboard will support Touch ID. The 7-Core GPU model ($1,299) comes in blue, green, pink and silver. The 8-Core GPU models ($1,499 or $1,699 depending on storage size) comes in those colors plus yellow, orange and purple.

The M1 iMac is a good option for:

• Existing iMac users who need to upgrade
• Knowledge workers who want a desktop instead of a laptop/external monitor combo

• Creative pros who don't need the power of Mac Pro or MacBook Pro or an extra-large monitor

Apple MacBook Air (M1 2020)

The M1 MacBook Air can be configured with a 7-Core GPU or 8-Core GPU variant of the M1 chip, 8GB or 16GB of RAM, 256GB (only available on the 7-Core M1 version), 512GB, 1TB or 2TB of SSD storage. Unlike previous generations, the 2020 Air does not have a cooling fan. The laptop has 2x Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports, 3.5mm headphone jack, and 13.3-inch display. It supports Wi-Fi with 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 5.0. Pricing starts at $999 for a 7-Core GPU model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. This is the same starting price as the previous generation. A maxed-out M1 MacBook Air with 8-Core GPU, 16GB of RAM and 2TB of storage will run you $2,049.

The M1 MackBook Air is a good option for:

• Existing MacBook Air users who need an upgrade
• Laptop users who aren't constantly maxing their CPU or GPU (executives, sales staff, knowledge workers, non-engineering students, etc.)
• Creative pros, photographers, video producers, graphic artists, etc., who need a highly portable laptop

TechRepublic and our sibling site ZDNet will actually be testing one of the M1 MacBook Airs as a video production machine in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for our test results and full review.

Apple MacBook Pro (13-inch M1 2020)

The 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro can be configured with 8GB or 16GB of RAM, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB or 2TB of SSD storage, 2x Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports, 3.5mm headphone jack, and 13.3-inch display. Unlike the new Air, it does a cooling fan as well as Apple's Touch Bar. It supports Wi-Fi with 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 5.0. Pricing starts at $1,299 for Pro with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. A M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and 2TB of storage will set you back $2,299.

Braid game download mac. The 13-inch M1 MackBook Pro is a good option for:

• Existing MacBook Pro users who need to upgrade
• Creative pros who need sustained performance from their CPU and GPU
• Developers, engineers, CAD users, etc. (or students in these fields) who normally work on a laptop

I will be testing a 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro against my current machine--a late 2016, 15-inch MacBook Pro. I'm especially interested to see how the M1's integrated GPU and 16GB combined memory compares to the older machine's discrete GPU and 4GB of graphics RAM.

Apple Mac mini (M1 2020)

The M1 Mac Mini can be configured 8GB or 16GB of RAM, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB or 2TB of SSD storage, 2x Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports, HDMI 2.0 port, Gigabit Ethernet port, 2x USB-A ports, 3.5mm headphone jack, and built-in speaker. It supports Wi-Fi with 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 5.0. Pricing starts at $699 for a model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. This is $100 less than the previous generation. A fully-kitted-out Mac mini with 16GB of RAM and 2TB of storage however, is still expensive at $1,699.

As the lowest-priced M1 Mac, the Mac mini is a good option for:

• Existing Mac mini owners who need to upgrade
• Creative pros and desktop users who don't need the power of a Mac Pro or the integrated screen on the iMac or iMac Pro, but need sustained performance
• Developers who want to get started building apps for Apple Silicon
• IT Staff who need to test the new M1 machines

Apple M1 SoC and software compatibly..TL;DR

The above recommendations also assume you've done your homework on how Apple's move from Intel-based processors to ARM chips will affect software compatibility. But if you haven't been following the story here's the TL;DR version.

Macbook Pro M1 Virtualbox

Apple has been planning the transition away from Intel silicon in Macs for some time and officially announced their plans at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2020. The company has been using its own chips in the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch for years, and using Apple chips in Macs has plenty of benefits:

1. By not relying on Intel, Apple can better control its component costs (better profit margins) and supply chain (Intel's delay to its 7nm process).
2. Developers can more easily build an app that runs across all Apple hardware.
3. Users will get a more 'seamless workflow' across iOS, iPadOS and macOS devices.
4. The M1 will help Apple stand out in a crowded market. As Larry Dignan wrote in his assessment of the M1 on ZDNet, 'Apple Silicon is likely to be a differentiator. Apple can market its processors well and Apple fans are likely to buy-in.'

There is one potential hiccup that IT departments and buyers will need to understand. Software written for Intel x86_64 processors that use complex instruction set computing (CISC) can't run natively on arm64 processors that use reduced instruction set computing (RISC). For most M1 Mac buyers this shouldn't be an issue.

All of the apps that come with the latest macOS version, Big Sur (macOS 11.0), or that are made by Apple have been optimized to work with M1 chip. Safari, iWork apps like Pages, Numbers and Keynote, iMovie, Final Cut Pro, GarageBand, etc. will work just fine.

iPhone and iPad apps will also run natively on M1 Macs. Although how well iPadOS and iOS apps are able to utilize the larger screen of a Mac is TBD.

Then there are what Apple calls 'universal apps' that include both a native binary version for Apple Silicon and one for Intel chips. When you download one of these apps, it will work on either an M1 or Intel Mac. During the launch event, Apple noted that Adobe would be making universal version of its apps available, starting with Lightroom in December and Photoshop early next year.

Big Sur can also run software written exclusively for Intel chips thanks to a new version of Rosetta. Originally introduced in 2006 when Apple was transitioning from PowerPC to Intel processors, Rosetta is a binary translator, which according to the company 'allows users to run apps that contain x86_64 instructions on Apple silicon.'

Rosetta is a stop-gap measure however. Apple want's developers to eventually convert their existing Intel apps to Apple Silicon apps. And frankly, the speed of the Apple Silicon transition will depend on how quickly software developers jump on board.

Macbook Pro M1 Virtualbox App

Also see

Virtualbox M1 Chip

• Apple's M1: A closer look at the chip inside of the latest Macs (TechRepublic)

• Apple's MacBook Air with M1 chip: Everything you need to know (TechRepublic)

• Apple Silicon: Why developers don't need to worry about the transition from Intel-based Macs (TechRepublic)

• Apple's M1 processor means faster transition away from Intel, but Mac Mini your best bet (ZDNet)

• Sony PS5: It's not too late, here's where to buy the next-gen gaming console (TechRepublic)