Studio on Apple Silicon Macs, and on Apple's other ARM devices

With Apple transitioning its Mac lineup to their own arm-based Apple Silicon, it’s highly likely that Roblox will be recompiling Studio to work natively on these newer Macs. I don’t see a reason not to anyways, as Studio is already supported on current Macs, and seeing that Apple is dedicated to moving its entire lineup to their own CPUs, there’s no avoiding the transition. Of course, transitions like these take time and even Apple has said theirs will take up to 2 years, so I don’t expect Roblox to announce support for these newer Macs on day one.

So you might be wondering what the big deal is? Studio on Macs? Great, whatever, I use a Windows PC anyways! Well, as soon as Roblox begins to support arm-based Macs for Studio, this means that it could easily run on Apple’s iPad’s, more interestingly the iPad Pro. Of course, Studio would have to be submitted through the App Store in order to be supported on iPadOS, but the common CPU architecture will allow it to easily run on both devices. Apple has even said that their iOS and iPadOS apps will be able to run natively on Apple Silicon Macs in the future. Seeing as the iPad Pro is faster than most PC laptops, and with iPadOS adding full support for mouse and keyboard support, this really seems like a no-brainer.

Don’t get me wrong, transitioning Studio to Apple Silicon Macs will be no easy feat to achieve, let alone bringing Studio to the iPad and adding touch support (not that we would use it over mouse+keyboard, Apple just requires iOS apps to support touch natively). However, the shared CPU architecture means that this definitely could come to fruition in the future. And with Roblox growing at an incredibly fast rate, this would only open up the doors to future developers on their platform, and make Roblox development way more accessible.

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Update: The newly released Mac mini, MacBook Air, and 13’ MacBook Pro (2 thunderbolt ports) have now been released with Apple Silicon (the M1 chip). Performance seems impressive, especially for graphics-related tasks. Apple has said the chip has the “fastest integrated GPU” ever, even outperforming some previous generation GTX cards. I really hope Roblox can release a native ARM version soon; it will greatly benefit development as well as gameplay for Mac users.

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Bumping to say that this is long overdue and still isn’t done.

Apps that I am surprised that got a Universal/native app are available, while Roblox and Roblox Studio are the only apps that are Intel based on my M1 MacBook Air.

Because of Rosetta, I can usually have only 5 studios with light workflows opened at a time. This was similar to apps when they used Rosetta.

Roblox Studio also sucks a lot of battery due to Rosetta, and this is just a huge problem. I can’t get through 2 hours with 1 Studio window on a full charge.

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