Dropbox finally supports M1 Macs natively with new beta

Dropbox’s latest beta has added native support for Macs with M1 processors, 9to5Mac reports. The addition was confirmed by a Dropbox community manager on the company’s forums, and we’ve verified it by installing the latest beta of the macOS app. You can grab it yourselves from this Dropbox forum.

The service has always worked on Apple’s M1 Macs, but until now it’s had to use Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation layer. This allowed the macOS app, which was originally designed for old Intel-based Macs, to run on machines with Apple’s new M1 processors. Offering native M1 support should result in Dropbox having better performance and consuming less power when used with Apple Silicon devices. That said, Rosetta translation is so fast you might not notice a difference in day-to-day use (we haven’t so far).

Dropbox was one of the last high-profile holdouts still lacking support for Apple’s ARM-based processors. In October there was some controversy after forum posts from the company’s employees suggested more customers would have to ask for a native M1 version before the company would develop it. The outcry that followed prompted Dropbox’s CEO to publicly announce that an M1-optimized version of the company’s macOS app would arrive in the first half of 2022.