Macbook Pro with Apple silicon

[bd139]

Altium may work in Crossover: https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover

Not tried it. LTspice for Windows does work though.

I have a spare windows laptop, an old Lenovo T440, if I need to run anything specific to windows. Which is rarely, if ever these days.

[kalhana]

Thanks. That's good to know and hopefully performance and support will improve over time.
When I was upgrading last year, people seemed to have mixed results and laggy performance for Altium (on reddit), so I didn't want to risk it.

[wizard69]

Here is a few points that you might want to consider if you are about to buy an Apple Silicon Mac.  Understand that I have an M1 MBA and a Linux box at home.   At work I have a really bad but brand new Windows surface machine (managed by the IT department)

• The performance of these M1 based machines is surprisingly good.
• Software has been ported to ARM at a surprisingly fast rate, faster than I expected and in most case leading to better performance.
• This fast software porting to M1 has resulted in much of the open source world running native.  Most of homebrew is native these days.
• A port of Linux to the platform is coming along slowly.   However I will not install Linux until I phase out this machine as my primary Mac OS platform.
• So far kiCAD and other CAD tools seem to run as well as they do on Linux.   In fact because Mac OS is Unix, for the most part the apps run better than on Windows.
• Python and other tools run just like they do on Linux so again trouble free compared to Windows.

Now about Windows.   Unless you work hard on backwards compatibility a lot of software has been left behind with the advent of 64bit windows.   Since I work in the industrial sector we have a lot of special function windows software that just doesn't run on modern windows operating systems.   YOu can't really assume that Windows will run legacy software, in most cases it will not.

So you really need to look at what is actively supported software.   If the software you want to use is on the Apple platform you are golden.   If not; you need to determine if alternative software is available or emulation will work.   

By the way there is no "BEST" software.    That can lead to making poor platform choices.   Instead consider what your needs are and if the platform in question supports those needs.

[PlainName]

If the software you want to use is on the Apple platform you are golden.

Are you saying you can take any random program from, say, 1999 and run it as-is on current Macs?

[Bassman59]

If the software you want to use is on the Apple platform you are golden.

Are you saying you can take any random program from, say, 1999 and run it as-is on current Macs?

Applications must be 64-bit to run on current Macs and current macOS.

[PlainName]

If the software you want to use is on the Apple platform you are golden.

Are you saying you can take any random program from, say, 1999 and run it as-is on current Macs?

Applications must be 64-bit to run on current Macs and current macOS.

So perhaps not as golden as Windows, then - any 32-bit app should be fine on current Windows, and 32-bit goes back a looong way. As an example, I just run up an application that was last updated in 2004, and it also ran an addon (basically a DLL) which was written in 1996.

Could a current Mac do that?

[bd139]

No 64 bit only. The current Rosetta translation will run x86-64 Mach binaries on ARM64 though. Haven’t had a 32 bit binary on macOS for a number of years so meh.

You can run 32 bit macOS and windows in UTM if you need it though via qemu.

I don’t rate windows binary compat. It looks like it works but there are so many edge cases that’s it’s unusable. I had to keep a windows NT4 box spinning until 2019 as a EDI dialler because it didn’t work on anything later.