Thanks @justin8 !
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Have you tested against a MBP with an Intel CPU and discreet Intel GPU, or an Intel CPU and a dedicated AMD GPU?
Up to now, I couldn’t get the Pro Render to work with Rhino on my MBP (it works in Blender though). It always crashes when compiling.
Doesn’t the M1 feature an 8-core GPU or something? If the 3000 Cuda cores are only about 20x faster, the M1 still seems pretty good. 
Your videos are well produced. I dig the CNC stuff.
I’d be interested to see how it performance in big rhino scenes (500+ individual breps or 1000+ meshes), how the Cycles renderer performs, if large Grasshopper definitions with lots of scribbles and groups lag a lot, etc.
I’ve attentively watched your video and apart from opening Rhino a tiny little bit snappier and the seemingly epic battery life (or low current consumption), I couldn’t really discern any difference between it and my 2016 MPB performance-wise.
The only two videos videos I’ve seem that seem to show scenarios beyond “vanilla workflows” (opening the Podcast app, opening the Calendar, modelling a cube in SketchUp, surfing in Safari, exporting a small video with Final Cut, etc.) - which by the way any modern mac can do great -, were one where a guy showed Blender stills and animation rendering, and another one showing compilation in Xcode, which seemed quite fast. The performance for Blender rendering seemed just okay though.
It’s for when you get tired of the Arctic one and want to welcome some color into your life.
After having done at least a couple of hundred ambient occlusion renderings back in the day for a lack of rendering skills, I can’t stand the look any more.
Sorry to jump in like that, but I’m puzzled by the new title of this thread.
Does that mean that one can run Rhino on a bootcamp M1 Mac ? Is Bootcamp still an option ?
Shopping for hardware, but commited to the Windows side of the force…
from what i have understood, is that technically it should be possible to run Windows, but Microsoft does not seem to have a licence for Apple’s ARM Architecture (yet) and Bootcamp is officially not provided anymore. I read that Parallels seems to work fine on M1, no idea if that would mean that Rhino would work with this setup.
From what I’ve read Bootcamp - the application - is available on both the Intel and ARM macs on Big Sur. However, it currently only works/is supported on the Intel ones. There is no official support for Windows on ARM macs yet (and possibly never will be). As @encephalon mentioned it mainly depends on Microsoft providing an ARM license, because they clearly already have an ARM Windows. What else would run on their ARM-based surface books?
They currently also have lots of issues with Windows 10 running stably. Only look at the update debacle from last month and this week. Macs are probably not a priority, when even Windows doesn’t seem to be any more. I guess Teams, Office 360, Azure, etc. are better cash cows these days! 
Parallels currently supports Windows virtualisation on Big Sur though. It’s said to run great, but it’s running a system within a system, and McNeel clearly states on their website that running Rhino this way is not supported.
Thanks.
Getting a PC.
Bootcamp is NOT available on M1 / Arm Macs. Bootcamp is what allows you to reboot into windows (or other OSs) on Intel Macs.
There are some people who are making a version of Linux that works natively on the M1 Macs. These do not use Bootcamp because it doesn’t exist for the M1 Macs.
Maybe one day, Microsoft might release the Arm version of windows in such a way that it can be installed directly on the M1 Macs.
As you say, Parallels is available (as a preview I believe) for M1 Macs, but as a virtualisation app, it just allows running of the Arm version of windows, not the x86 version and that’s within a window on the Mac rather than full rebooting as with Bootcamp. There are a couple of other virtualisation options out there too (can’t recall their names).
Hello, everyone, i am thinking to sell my 6 moths old windows pc to buy m1 air or pro but i couldnt make sure if i would be regretfull tby doing this. Any suggestions?
Am a long term Mac user, tried Windows PC for 1 year and then switched back to the Mac again.
so here are some hopefully helpful questions, you could ask yourself:
- are the plugins/programs needed for your usual workflow all available for macOS?
- if not, are there viable alternatives you could use?
- Is the performance the M1 is delivering enough for you? heard that the CPU is crazy fast, but the GPU was rather “ok”, maybe wait for that M1X hopefully coming out at WWDC?
If you answer most of the question positively; I would personally go for it… Finally, another factor for me was having polished hardware/software in my hands, where you can see love in (almost) every detail.
Hi, thank you for the answer, i usually use autocad, unity and sometimes blender with rhino. Autocad an blender is working with rossetta 2 for now and its been said that their performance is okay. And for the plug-ins, i just search if i need any plug-ins avaible to help current project so i dont use some particular ones unfortunarely and that makes me thinking if that plug in is not avaible for mac:)
For the hardware i am currently use rtx2060 and amd 7 4800u and as far as i know from the interview videos on youtube, both cpu and gpu performance of m1 is close/more to my current hardware so main problem is if i need something and it is not avaible on mac, especailly silicon macs:)
I’m a long term Mac user as well, and use Windows boxes frequently too.
I would warn against getting any of the current M1 Macs, not because of software compatibility issues, but simply because they clearly aren’t meant to be pro-sumer devices!
You should wait until WWDC in June (?), as Rudi mentioned above, or probably the end of the year, until a line of more powerful devices is said to be released with an updated ARM chip, more GPU power, and more choices for memory. Especially the memory ceiling of 16GB in the current models is something to be very conscious about!
I don’t know about that. At least in terms of GPU-performance the RTX2060 should easily beat the M1 with the 8-core GPU? What are your reasons for getting a Mac?
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I got the point, thanks for advice! It is better to wait until WWDC.
Yes you were right, it is my mistake, i couldnt remember correctly the video i watch, m1’s cpus are powerfull then mine amd 7 4800u but gpus are even below GTX1650 mobile, sorry for the mistake:)
I want to have a mac because of it is very easy to carry around and having great battery life and as far as i know, it doesnt lose too power when using it with battery unlike my windows laptop, i dont work on a desk always and i get sick of carrying charger with me and trying to find a place to plug it in.
I see! Yes, portable Macs usually have a better battery life and are lighter than other laptop. The M1s even seem to have a ludicrously great battery life. I have a friend who has the M1 MacBook Air and she usually doesn’t charge it for up to two days, while working on it lightly for hours at a time. She mainly does office work though and casually uses Affinity Designer, no CAD or CG. And it is quiet, which for me is a big thing. I can’t stand noisy computers!
I love that I can’t even hear my MacBook Pro while doing normal work. It’s whisper quiet, when it isn’t rendering. 
Have you used macOS before? I don’t want to discourage you, it’s certainly in many aspects superior to Windows, if only for the fact that it has the Unix filesystem and shell, and it’s very tastefully skinned. However, some Windows users hate it, because everything is a little different, even the shortcuts.
I absolutely adore macOS. You can run it for days, weeks, months without rebooting your machine once and the performance stays great. macOS maintains itself, while it’s sleeping. Updates are unobtrusive and very rarely break stuff and you don’t need to deal with drivers for anything. It’s very stable which allows you to be very productive!
Yes i have used macos before for like couple moths when i was in collage and i loved it but had to switch to windows back because Maxsurf(sorftware for marine engeneers) is not avaible for macs.
Is your MacBook Pro is M1? If it is are you using for rhino with heavy files and are you happy with it?
Not yet, no, it’s a 2016 MacBook Pro (2.9GHz i7, 16GB RAM, 2TB SSD, Radeon Pro 460 4GB). I’ll probably get a second one, when a more powerful M2, M1X, or whatever comes out. This one still works pretty well, but after 4 or 5 years you always run the risk of getting some kind of hardware failure. Mine has been very heavily used, too.
What are you calling heavy files? But yes, I use it for Rhino a lot and I’m still happy with the performance. I’m a quite seasoned Rhino and Grasshopper user, which means I know how to handle stuff so that I don’t end up with bottlenecks in the first place.
Rhino in many respects works great on macOS, but in some areas seems very unoptimized.
Other programs that I frequently use ArchiCAD, Blender, Affinity Designer, Adobe bloatware, AutoCAD, etc. seem much more optimized in many regards. That said I often do things in Rhino that it probably isn’t meant for and I like to experiment with new, experimental features! And of all these programs Rhino is by far my favourite. 
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Rhino is my favorite too:) By the heavy files, i mean like incloude too many objects and more then 1.5 GB in size. I am wondering how M1 macs would perform with such a file in rendered viewport. But i guess it is best to stuck with windows for now(unfortunately).
OK, most of my files have at least a couple of hundred geometry objects, which usually work pretty flawlessly. I have a few with maybe a little over a thousand, and these files might be slower but still workable. What I usually do when things get slow is export some geometries to separate files and reimport them as referenced blocks, which I can especially recommend for geometries that are used more than once in your scene. It’s much lighter than simply copying.
In Grasshopper, as soon as I have more than say 100 components in my scene, I usually start to make clusters or simply strategically partition my project over more than one Grasshopper file.
Yes, I would be interested to see that too. There isn’t much content out there yet. I’ve seen a Blender rendering video on YouTube, where the performance seemed okay, but Blender already runs natively on ARM and is generally better integrated into the Mac ecosystem than Rhino.
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Wow, this is great input. I had no clue. Probably this is why there are no NVidia cards available for Mac and OS X only AMD