Announcing: Apple Silicon M1 support now available!

Announcements Releases
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We are very excited to announce that we have Apple Silicon M1 support for our macOS executor! All customers on an annual plan can take advantage of the fast performance offered by this new resource class.

We’ve seen up to 2x performance gains on our M1 resources, compared to our other macOS resource classes. Additionally, you can build for Intel apps using our M1 resources by installing Rosetta. For an example on doing this, reference this macOS orb PR.

For more information on the power of M1 and getting started with these new resources, check out our docs!

Specs & Pricing

  • resource class tag: macos.m1.large.gen1
  • 8 vCPU
  • 12GB RAM
  • 400 credits / minute
  • Scale plan
    • Note: Apple Silicon support for Performance customers will be coming this year. Stay tuned!

Xcode Image Support
We currently have support for Xcode 14.2 on our M1 resource class, but will be releasing support for the remaining supported versions in April. Customers using the preview 13.4.1 and 14.0.1 images will need to update to 14.2 by March 9, when those images will no longer be available.

Xcode 13.4.1 is the oldest version that will be supported on these resources.

:information_source: VM Image Info :information_source:

Xcode 14.2 Build version 14C18 is installed at /Applications/Xcode-14.2.app

The full manifest of installed software can be found here

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Great to hear that! Thanks for the update.

With 400 credits/min it would be more than 5 times as expensive as the current Intel executor (75 credits/min). What is the reasoning behind this drastic increase?

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Hi @mathaeus! We’ve priced M1 higher than our Intel-based resources because it offers the highest level of performance and testing abilities. While 400 credits is higher than our other macOS resources, at about 24 cents/min it is more affordable than other similar solutions in the market. We also have plans to add additional Apple silicon resources, including medium VMs, which will provide a variety of options and price points.

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:warning: Update: The preview images have now been removed. Please use Xcode 14.2 for your M1 jobs. We will be releasing additional Xcode versions for M1 in the early April.

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That’s a bit unfortunate, when Apple introduced Apple Silicon, the same money would buy you a much faster Mac. Not only this is not true in CircleCI but it’s actually quite the opposite.
If feels like you are penalizing using the Apple Silicon executors :frowning:

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Yeah exactly. Apple’s M1 machines are faster, cheaper, use less energy, and you’re charging us… more to use them? Time so start looking into Xcode Cloud, I guess…

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The performance increase is not commensurate with the cost increase: ~2x performance increase for 4x the price.

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