Native Apple silicon support

February 20th, 2023

In late 2020, Apple introduced their first machines sporting Apple Silicon, the brand name for their custom ARM CPUs. Spine has been running on Apple Silicon hardware through Rosetta 2, a pretty impressive piece of software that translates x86 instructions to ARM instructions. This allows Spine to run unmodified on Apple Silicon, despite being built for Intel-based Macs.

Today we're happy to announce native Apple Silicon support for Spine! The native Apple Silicon version starts up faster and provides improved performance compared to running Spine via Rosetta 2. You can download the Apple Silicon launcher from your Spine license page.

With the new launcher, Spine versions from 4.0 onward run natively on Apple Silicon. Older versions still have to go through Rosetta 2, as they do not share the revamped architecture of our 4.x line of Spine. Of course you can still run these old versions through the new launcher.

Share your experience with Spine running natively on Apple Silicon on the forum.