About Apple Silicon ("M1" or "M2") Macs

Apple is now selling devices based on their ARM based M1 and M2 chips. These chips are not compatible with the Intel based chips that Apple has been using for a few years now. That implies that the operating system and applications needs to be ported to the new architecture.

Apple has already ported the OS, and many applications have been ported, but not all. Apps that have not been ported can be run via a compatibility layer called 'Rosetta 2', provided by Apple. Unfortunately Apple has decided not to ship Rosetta 2 directly with the OS. Users can install Rosetta 2 via the Mac Self-Service or manually by running 'sudo /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta'. The Mac Self-Service only shows the Rosetta 2 installer when Rosetta 2 is not installed already. We have added Rosetta 2 to all frequently installed packages that require it.

ESET

ESET Anti-virus for M1 based Macs is available in the Self-Service since April 7th, 2021. Due to a bug (in ESET or in macOS for arm) arm based Macs need to be restarted twice after installing a macOS update to make ESET function properly.

Parallels Desktop

Parallels Desktop 17 is now available for arm based Macs. It will only allow creation of the arm64 based windows or linux versions. Windows for arm64 is still in beta. Future availibility of applications for arm64 windows is still unknown. Creating virtual Macs is not yet supported in Parallels Desktop for M1 based Macs. If you plan to run VMs on your Mac you should not go for M1 based models. Most likely your existing VMs created on Intel Macs will not work on M1 based Macs.

Mounting dfs via Webdav

With macOS versions below 11.3 M1 Macs froze when trying to modify files residing in DFS mounted via webdav (https://dfs.cern.ch/...).

Self-Service

Frequently installed packages that require Rosetta 2 do install it automatically now if needed. Some actions from the Self-Service will still fail if Rosetta 2 is not installed already. The installation of Rosetta 2 can be triggered via the Self-Service. If Rosetta 2 is not proposed in the Self-Service on an arm based Mac you can assume that it is installed already.

XQuartz

XQuartz 2.8.1 is supposed to work natively on ARM based Macs, but there are many known problems, in particular with OpenGL.