NOTE: This document may change often. As new software gets updated for Apple Silicon this document will be ever-evolving.
In November 2020, Apple released their first Macintosh computers running custom Apple designed CPUs instead of using the Intel CPUs they had used in the prior decade. These CPUs run an architecture called ARM (Acorn Risc Machine).
At the lowest level, the CPU (Central Processing Unit) of a computer uses something called an instruction set to actually do the work of running programs.
In this course we learn JavaScript and Python which are both high-level languages.
So, does that mean we don't have to worry about the instruction set of our CPUs?
Not directly, but since we've had more than a decade of Apple computers using the Intel x86 instruction set (sometimes abbreviated x86, x64, x86_64 or i386), much of the software we use hasn't been compiled for the new Apple Silicon architecture called ARM (Acorn Risc Machines, sometimes abbreviated as arm64).
Your Apple Silicon based Mac has a piece of software called Rosetta 2 that will translate x86 instuctions into ARM instructions. This is mostly transparent, although the software does run with about 70% of the performance of software compiled directly for ARM.
Luckily as of March 2021, we don't have to use Rosetta 2 for most of our development tools.
Some apps are 'universal' on macOS. This means they've been compiled for BOTH
Intel and ARM architectures, and the file for the app contains BOTH sets of
instructions. An example of this is the zsh shell. You can use the file
command in macOS to determine if an apple is intel, arm or universal.
file /bin/zsh
/bin/zsh: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64e:Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64e]
/bin/zsh (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
/bin/zsh (for architecture arm64e): Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64eYou can see zsh is universal since it lists both x86_64 and arm64e architectures.
Whenever we compile software from the command prompt, that software must be turned into machine code for whatever processor our computer has. Since macOS can run both x86 programs and ARM programs, we need a way to tell our computer we would like to run things in Rosetta or not from the command line.
MacOS ships with a command to do just that, the arch command.
You can run it at anytime and it will print out the current architecture of your shell.
> arch
arm64If it prints arm64 you are running natively on Apple Silicon. If it prints out
i386 you are running under Rosetta 2.
You can also preface any command with arch to force it to run under any
particular architecture. For instance if we would like to run our shell zsh
under Rosetta 2 we can do this:
arch -x86_64 zshThis starts a brand new shell that is running in Rosetta 2. If you use the
arch command by itself now, you'll see it prints out i386.
This is handy for when we want to run something in Rosetta 2.
However, as of March 2021, several improvments have been made to how homebrew, node and python work on Apple Silicon machines, and it is possible to install them as native ARM compiled binaries so we won't need to use Rosetta 2 much for our development.
If you run the homebrew installer on an M1 Mac. Homebrew will install the ARM
version of homebrew into the /opt/homebrew folder instead of the usual
/usr/local folder used on Intel macs. So, you can follow the normal
instructions for setting up Homebrew on macOS.
Python 3.9 will compile under ARM, so we mostly use the regular macOS instructions
to install it, however Python 3.9 needs homebrew ARM versions of openssl and readline installed. This step is included in the Python setup directions.
You can check what architecture your python is compiled with by running this at the python REPL once Python is installed.
>>> import platform
>>> platform.machine()
'arm64'Node.JS 12 and 14 have been updated to compile correctly on Apple Silicon. Node 16 also compiles correctly on Apple Silicon.
You can verify what architecture your node is compiled for by starting the Node.JS REPL and typing the following:
> os.arch();
'arm64'Google Chrome already has an Apple Silicon version of itself. You should definitely install this version when downloading Chrome.
Visual Studio Code is available compiled as either Intel, Apple Silicon or as a Universal App.
You can install either the Apple Silicon or Universal Version and it will work well on your Apple Silicon based Mac.
Docker is generally available for Apple Silicon. You can install it by downloading docker desktop from this location: