Google Embraces Apple Silicon With Google Drive Support For M1

Google Drive for desktop is getting an update to fully support Macs with Apple’s M1 chip (Apple Silicon). Google Drive is a fantastic utility to store pretty much anything. From documents to photos or videos, Google Drive will store it as long as enough cloud storage is available to you.

Apple’s M1 chip is the company’s first custom chip designed specifically for the Mac. It’s able to deliver great performance without destroying battery life and results in little to no fan noise. Currently, the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro, 24-inch iMac, and low-end Mac mini run on Apple Silicon. For apps not updated for Apple Silicon, Apple has a translation layer called Rosetta 2 that allows most applications to run on Apple Silicon, just not natively.

About a year after the release of the first Apple Silicon Macs, Google has officially updated Google Drive to support the M1 chip. As the company points out in the release notes, version 52.0 of Google Drive now runs natively on Apple Silicon. Before this, Google Drive was running under Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation layer which enables most Intel applications to run on Apple Silicon. While Google didn’t specify, today’s update supports the full M1 family of chips including the new M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pros. The release notes read, “Implemented full support for Apple silicon (M1) Mac computers.”

A Win For M1 Mac Owners

While it took Google longer to get Google Drive on Apple Silicon than some might have hoped, it’s better late than never. Plus, Google Drive seemed to work just fine without any major issues under Rosetta 2. Alongside Apple Silicon, today’s Google Drive update also includes the ability to purchase additional cloud storage from within the app, improved sync performance when coming back online, and more. Regardless, today’s update is good news for Apple Silicon Mac owners.

That’s now one less application that requires using Rosetta 2, and if history is to be believed, Rosetta 2 won’t stick around forever. As time goes on and more applications are updated to support Apple Silicon, Apple may choose to eventually remove Rosetta 2 from the system entirely. This means applications that never get updated for Apple Silicon will eventually no longer run on Macs with Apple Silicon. But, that’s at least a few years away as Apple Silicon has only been around for about a year. There are still a decent amount of applications that still haven’t been updated for Apple Silicon yet. And of course, Apple still has a few Macs left that are still running on Intel chips that have not been transitioned to Apple Silicon yet.

Source: Google

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