Native M1

pocahontasdividends

Are there any plans to support M1 directly without Rosetta? or is that impossible with how the app is made?

btw I know it has been said already, but I just wanted to echo, the server design is what attracted me to try it out, good job on the idea!

Indigo

Yes, absolutely, 100% M1 support is coming! The app itself is native on M1 already. The next step is just a matter of compiling all the bundled binaries both for x86 and m1. It also means I'll need to distribute two separate versions of the app, for size reasons. In the end, these M1 Macs are so powerful that the x86 binaries are giving excellent performance already, so for all these reasons I decided to hold off for now and prioritise improving functionality.

However, I'm not forgetting that one of the key points of Indigo is to extract the most performance our Macs are offering, and not to run things in an inefficient way, so absolutely full-M1 is on the roadmap.

netnicks

I was just wondering, is this still on the roadmap? I know it's not that important since the fine performance results but i don't like the idea of wasting resources ;-)

Indigo

Absolutely, yes, still where we're headed, although it's also possible that x86 usage may continue to tail off steeply enough that we hold off and go Apple silicon-only instead.

At a technical level I could do an m-only version today, but I'm avoiding the additional effort for two separate builds as long as possible.

netnicks

Indigo Yeah I can definitely understand that maintaining two seperate versions is just inefficient.

I think alot of us using indigo are already on apple silicon. Guess you can see that in metrics as well?

Indigo

Unfortunately the metrics we collect are extremely minimal, principally because we're determined to be privacy-focussed and send virtually nothing. We tried an opt-in thing a while back but almost nobody turned it on 😆

So what we do have comes solely from the automatic updater mechanism, which if turned on, occasionally (about once a week) sends some really minimal data. The good news is this does include the machine type.

Over the past 30 days we've seen about 1:3 Intel to Apple silicon ie 25% are still on x86. A year ago, it was 1:2, so ~33% on x86.

netnicks

Indigo I think it's definitely a good starting ground to be collecting minimal data. I personally value my privacy, but understand the importance of good metrics as well for product developers.

Also, i understand an opt-in doesn't work - looking at myself and developers around me i think most of them are somewhat privacy minded.

Though a smaller portion of the user base, 25% is still quite a lot - i really thought this would be even lower. Thanks for the insights! Let's hope this curve keeps growing in favor of a silicon-only variant of Indigo.

Indigo

Totally agree re the curve 🙂 Personally I'd rather have a base 2020 M1 MacBook Air than almost any Intel Mac, and where I live those early M1's are pretty cheap nowadays. Perhaps the 25% are ultra-powerful Hackintoshes 🤪

netnicks

Indigo Couldn't agree more. Thinking back of the first M1 I started using (just base M1)back in 2021, it was unbelievable the improvement I saw coming from an i5 iMac (OK, the mac was already 4 years old at that time, so not a really fair comparison, but then again - it was the base M1).

Only time will tell, if the metrics show less than 10% we'll abandon them right? 😆