Dropbox Planning to Add Native Apple Silicon Support to Mac App in First Half of 2022 [Updated]

[osplo]

iCloud can do "Optimize Storage for iCloud" which makes it decide what to sync and what not all by itself for you - transparently.

Thanks, I was aware of it. I was asking for real selective sync.

I know very well which folders I will need and which not in different scenarios; and cannot risk jumping into a plane with half the files. Selective Sync is something I do need.

Pity, as I am paying for both iCloud and Dropbox and I'd love to pay for only one.

 

[cgs1xx]

I think their price plans is a bigger issue…

 

[el-John-o]

I wouldn't worry about this. Remember, Dropbox and many other apps not yet converted "just work" as they always have. By the time that Rosetta 2 is no more, those that find the Mac segment profitable enough will have converted their apps. Those that don't, won't.

By that time, you'll probably be on your next M-series Mac and you can keep the old one around for Rosetta 2 needs. Again, I've still got a Snow Leopard Mac running for Rosetta 1 needs for apps that never converted.

This is likely just business. Mac Silicon is the future but the bulk of the Mac market is still Intel Macs. Rosetta lets just about everything that works on Intel work on Silicon. So companies can take their time evolving their apps while Rosetta 2 is available. Looking back at the Rosetta 1 transition, they have upwards of a few YEARS before they need to either work natively or not. I doubt something as important as Dropbox won't be there long before it gets to that. If they do as their leader said in the Tweet and roll out native in Q1, they will have likely beat the BULK of all such developers to being native.

Looking back at Rosetta 1, the biggest casualty will be some favorite games that have already made the bulk of their money. Some of them will definitely NOT be evolved. So if you have some favorites that seem to be towards the end of their popularity (as in new sales) cycle, plan to keep a Mac with Rosetta 2 or hang on to at least 1 Intel Mac.

Yes, but performance suffers (namely battery life) when you have an app running through Rosetta, or so claims Mx users.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Yes, I've seen that. But is that exclusively Dropbox app fault or Rosetta 2's fault... or perhaps both? Of course, one is created by Apple and the other is not, so it's obvious which must take the entire blast of fault in Apple fan opinions.

Like anything that eats battery- including plenty of default settings on iDevices- it seems an easy option here would be to "turn off" Dropbox while on battery. It's not like anyone needs continuous Dropbox access at all times. In my experience working with clients who universally seem to use Dropbox more than any other comparable option, we verbally prompt or text that a new file "has been put in the Dropbox folder..." after which the other parties go in and view/get it.

SO for a can't-plug-in, battery-management-minded user, they can simply leave Dropbox OFF until prompted (or plugged in) and then fire it up at that time, send/get the file to/from Dropbox and then close the Dropbox app again once that is accomplished.

My guess is all that crunching Rosetta 2 does to covert x86 to ARM probably contributes to at least some- if not- most of this battery drain. And if so, EVERY app not yet native that leans on Rosetta would likely show more battery drain than comparable apps that are native doing the same chore. There are PLENTY of popular/useful apps not yet native. But it seemed we focused the brunt of the frustration on this ONE.

Probably hundreds- maybe thousands- of variations of this very same thread could be started subbing in any of the other apps not yet native. Step back only a few months and one of them could have been Apple's own Filemaker Pro app which apparently could not be "converted by flipping a switch in the compiler." Of course, if this kind of thread would have been an APPLE app not yet converted, I bet most of the same people ripping Dropbox would have been far more forgiving: "it takes time to do it right"... "it takes time to test & debug"... "do you want fast and buggy or do you want it to 'just work'"... etc.

I can certainly appreciate everyone's desire for ALL apps to be native ASAP. However, many apps need a window of time to be converted, then thoroughly tested, etc. Obviously Apple believed that too or there would be no Rosetta 2... still very much active... and likely to continue to exist for at least another year or two.

 

[larob]

OneDrive added support for that last year. It works in the Mac and Windows clients.

good to know – thanks for this update

 

[dwaite]

Is this true? Why would Apple drop support for x86 applications? I think it's pretty cool what they have with Rosetta2, why not leave it as a feature?

Eventually they will have too many features which need ARM, and will want the storage space back.

Also, the Rosetta 2 x86 emulation requires them to support an entirely different memory concurrency model on each of their high performance cores. Eventually they'll want that silicon back, or will hit optimizations which aren't compatible.

18 months was basically the most aggressive timeline I could come up with - warnings starting in the spring after the Mac Pro gets updated and the last intel Mac leaves the lineup. It's certainly possible they will give more time, for instance to extend out ease of third party software testing and support for the Intel Macs through those machines' lifetimes.

 

[transpo1]

Their loss. They've made some strange decisions over the past several years, and the value of their services has dropped accordingly. There is such a good range of services at the moment that it's hard to keep falling back on the block-sync and reliability as strong features.

Box is just an all round better service, if you're after the best bang for buck.

Box is an all-around much better service; I use it at my job. But for personal use, they don't offer enough plans. Box Business Plans are where the real functionality is and those have a minimum of 3 users, which I don't need for personal use. If they offered a 2TB Personal plan, I'd drop Dropbox in a heartbeat, no pun intended

 

[osplo]

Eventually they will have too many features which need ARM, and will want the storage space back.

Also, the Rosetta 2 x86 emulation requires them to support an entirely different memory concurrency model on each of their high performance cores. Eventually they'll want that silicon back, or will hit optimizations which aren't compatible.

18 months was basically the most aggressive timeline I could come up with - warnings starting in the spring after the Mac Pro gets updated and the last intel Mac leaves the lineup. It's certainly possible they will give more time, for instance to extend out ease of third party software testing and support for the Intel Macs through those machines' lifetimes.

I don't think they'll drop Rosetta 2 in the near future. Say, there will be at least 5-6 years of official support.

And beyond that, you always have the option to keep a previous macOS in a machine for that particular app you cannot live without.

For instance, this is me holding to Mojave in one Mac because Picasa.

 

[KPOM]

I don't think they'll drop Rosetta 2 in the near future. Say, there will be at least 5-6 years of official support.

And beyond that, you always have the option to keep a previous macOS in a machine for that particular app you cannot live without.

For instance, this is me holding to Mojave in one Mac because Picasa.

It didn't take them that long to drop Rosetta 1 support after the Intel transition.

 

[KPOM]

And it’s awful, even on Intel Macs. I only use it because work forces me to.
Honestly the best solution is iCloud Drive...

Yes, and in Monterey OneDrive defaults to storing your files ONLY on the cloud. You have to change settings folder-by-folder to keep a copy stored locally.

 

[jace88]

Yes, and in Monterey OneDrive defaults to storing your files ONLY on the cloud. You have to change settings folder-by-folder to keep a copy stored locally.

I feel the Windows OneDrive client isn't ideal either even in Win11 given that so many people have the 1Tb OneDrive from Office365. Wish it wouldn't default to any particular choice and let us pick before it starts trying to sync!

I haven't installed it on my new MBP 14 M1P yet... waiting for native app as don't wanna go through that again (it was a beach ball mess on my MBP 13 M1).

edit: looks like OneDrive apple silicon native is deferred until Jan 2022 now according to MS roadmap.

 

[dwaite]

I don't think they'll drop Rosetta 2 in the near future. Say, there will be at least 5-6 years of official support.

I'll bet pretty highly against 5+ years.

Based on Rosetta 1, I'd guess one more major release, then macOS 14 will no longer have it by default. It will be removed completely around macOS 15 or 16, with some sort of pop-up warning that the software will stop working in future releases.

At the same time, laptops that come out after that release will no longer have the additional hardware to run Rosetta 2.

And beyond that, you always have the option to keep a previous macOS in a machine for that particular app you cannot live without.

Yep.

For instance, this is me holding to Mojave in one Mac because Picasa.

Keep in mind, one big reason Apple killed x86 32 bit apps was Rosetta 2. 32-bit x86 is _much_ harder to emulate efficiently - Microsoft likely was kicking themselves that they didn't deprecate 32-bit windows support and move all their apps forward, because their first pass of x86-on-arm had to be 32 bit to run Microsoft apps, and it ran them dog slow.

 

[Mike Boreham]

Latest Dropbox beta build 140.3.1852 is Apple Silicon native.

No problems so far, (but I didn't have before with Intel)

 

[polyphenol]

I've been using native M1 Maestral for a little while. My mini rebooted after a power-cut yesterday and something felt slightly different. Then I realised that I hadn't removed the Intel Dropbox client - just closed it - and it restarted with the reboot. Noticeable, though not dramatic, improvement when I closed it.

For my very limited purposes, Maestral does what I need and seems very light in resource usage. I won't be bothering with any official Dropbox M1 client unless something goes wrong.