Mworks and new macs

Support
1

Hi Chris,

I also have the opportunity to buy a laptop for myself to use in the lab. I am a windows user all my life, but realize I am in a mac lab now. One reason to pick a mac would be mworks coding at home… But there are rumors mworks is not compatible with newer macOSs or maybe the much-hyped M1 chip?

Do you know if mworks is/will be compatible with new hard- and software?

Thanks!

Alina

2

Hi Alina,

I don’t have access to an M1 Mac, so I haven’t been able to test MWorks on one. While it’s true that the MWorks installer still provides only Intel binaries, my expectation is that these would work fine via Rosetta.

If you’ve talked to folks who have had issues running MWorks on M1 Mac’s, maybe you can encourage them to contact me, so that I can investigate and resolve whatever problems they’re having?

Thanks,
Chris

3

I should add that I absolutely will be providing M1-native MWorks binaries in the future, but first I’ll need to acquire an M1 Mac to test them on.

Cheers,
Chris

4

Hi,

I don’t think anybody has a laptop with an M1 chip yet (though I will ask). Apparently the source of the rumors is the following event from Sachi

The problem I had (which Michael might be alluding to) was with my current rig: the Mac Pro machine is old (~2013), and when I updated the OS to the latest version, MWorks threw a lot of “skipped display refresh” errors because the graphics card couldn’t support it for some reason. Thus, I had to downgrade back to MacOS 10.12 (which Mac no longer officially supports). (Similar situation as this other user).

Followed by conjecture presumably by some others that this would be related somehow.

5

Thanks. I saw that and contacted Sachi about it, as the 2013 Mac Pro definitely should be able to run the latest macOS and MWorks releases. However, whatever the issue is, it has nothing to do with the M1, which that machine predates by almost 7 years.

As I said, I expect that MWorks will run fine under Rosetta on an M1 Mac. If you’re inclined to get a MacBook Air or 13‑inch MacBook Pro with the M1, I’d say go for it. It sounds like the M1-based laptops are pretty great.

Cheers,
Chris