On the front end, we depend on QtWebEngine, which also does not build for M1 (see QT-85279).

See Will R Work on Apple Silicon? from the R Core team. This is in the works, but currently held up due to dependencies on tooling further upstream.

Because we load R as a library, we need to wait for R itself to be ported to Apple silicon before RStudio can be fully ported.

Our build infrastructure will need to be updated to the latest version of Xcode to get support for cross-compiling to arm64.

The only downside of this approach is that it will make the binary enormous (as we will ultimately ship x86_64 and arm64 versions of Chromium). Thankfully it is possible to build arm64 binaries on x86_64 hardware.

We should do this as a universal binary, supporting x86_64 and arm64 without requiring a separate download.

This issue tracks the work needed to add native support for Apple's new ARM-based silicon to RStudio.

The largest dataset I use for my dissertation has ~1 million observations and reads in as a larger CSV (400MB, although I'm currently exploring more efficient options for reading in the data).R and RStudio work today on the M1 chip, albeit with compromised performance, via Rosetta2, an emulation layer. I have been worried by what I've seen about some buggy features of RStudio on the new M1 Macs.the main packages I use are the usual for data manipulation (tidyverse etc.) plus some mapping ones (sf, leaflet, usmap). The potential costs pain me but I really just need something that will reliably work for the next year and won't require me to completely change everything I've been doing.

I'm trying to decide if I should 1) pay for the repair or 2) just upgrade to a new laptop now since this one has been so glitchy and delay-ridden, and if so, if I should try hard to wait for the M1X. I am a graduate student right in the middle of my dissertation analyses in R and my laptop (2017 MacBook Pro, 8GB RAM, intel) has just gotten quoted for yet another expensive repair (argh!!).

Rstudio for mac m1