Zoom update adds support for Apple's Arm silicon M1-based Macs
Video-calling app Zoom has released a new version that supports Apple's blazing-fast Mac laptops with its new Arm-based processors.
Enterprise Software
Zoom supports over 300 million daily meeting participants these days after becoming the video-meeting service that the world turned to during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The move makes Zoom one of the first major software makers to bring native support to Apple's new M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini.
"Zoom desktop client will better support computers with ARM CPUs," Zoom says in release notes for its latest macOS update.
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Zoom is also publishing a separate installer for M1-based Macs that can be downloaded in the Zoom Download Center.
Zoom's Apple silicon update arrives just as Microsoft starts rolling out updates that allow many Microsoft 365 apps to run natively on Apple's M1 processors, including Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Previously, Microsoft had made most of its Microsoft 365 apps available for M1 computers via Apple's Rosetta 2 translation layer.
Like Microsoft's native apps for M1 devices, Zoom's new version becomes a 'Universal' binary, meaning it supports both Apple's Arm silicon and Macs with Intel chipsets with the same executable.
Zoom-rival Microsoft Teams has also enjoyed huge growth during the pandemic as Microsoft has packed in more key capabilities, perhaps most importantly the ability to see 49 people on screen – a feature that Zoom supported from the outside of the pandemic in early 2020. Microsoft Teams gained the feature over the summer. Teams currently has 115 million daily active users and earlier this month the 7x7 grid came to Teams in Chrome and Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge. However, Teams has not yet been updated with native support for M1 Macs.