Running Fusion with Rosetta 2 on Apple ARM-based M1 Chipsets

[keqingsong]

July 5, 2023 Update 

Hello all, the current Insider Build of Fusion now has native Apple Silicon support, and as you read some of the latest comments in this thread, the results are looking great. Our goal is make it available to everyone by our next product update, which should be happening towards the end of the month. If you want to try it now, you can sign up to join our Insider Program, and get access to the Insider Build. Keep in mind that once you become a member, you are under NDA and cannot sharing information publicly, with the exception of this particular project since it is already public knowledge. 

Click this link to sign-up and join: https://www.autodesk.com/campaigns/fusion-360/insider-program

Thank you to those you have who've expressed interested and have been testing it! Please continue to let us know about your experiences. 
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November 23, 2022 Update

As you know we have been working closely with Apple on native support for Fusion on Apple Silicon Chipsets (i.e. M1 & M2). We are pleased to announce that we expect to achieve full native support by Summer of 2023.

As we have explained in this thread, the delay is a result of the need to ensure 100% compatibility between components from over 100 3rd party vendors including Autodesk.

If you want to access this functionality as soon as possible, please consider joining the Insider Program. If you have any questions on the topic please contact @Rajkumar.ilanchelian.

October 28, 2021 Update

Hey all, thanks again for the passionate discussion here. Even though we haven't chimed into this thread as much as we wanted, we are reading every single response and are actively working on getting Fusion to be natively supported on the new Apple chipset. Here's what I know from talking to the development teams: 
We are actively working on getting native support. This is still going to take some time because Fusion uses a multitude of services to work the way it does (Autodesk-owned as well as 3rd party) many of which are also not natively supported on M1 chipsets yet. We are collaborating closely with those teams to taking the necessary steps to ensure that the services we use are also natively supported. There is a lot of passion internally to get this done as well, so we definitely feel you. Again, I can't not say when this will happen, but as soon as we have something more concrete to share, we'll be sure to update you all. 

April 29, 2021 Update

We've been actively working on resolving the issues mentioned below and are glad to report that these issues no longer exist when running Fusion on the M1 chipset. We are also working closely with Apple and are in the process of certifying Fusion as 100% compatible running on M1 chipsets via Rosetta 2. 

In terms of running Fusion natively on the M1 chipset without Rosetta 2, we are still working towards this goal but is going to take some time to reach. We are confident to say that running Fusion on the M1 chipset via Rosetta 2 should be indistinguishable from running it on an Intel-based chipset, if not faster. 

If there are specific issues you've experience and are not mentioned below (strike-through items), please chime in and respond to this thread so we are aware and can look into it ASAP. Thank you for your continued support! 

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Apple's original press release 

We are delighted to see Fusion being featured in the most recent Apple ARM-based M1 Macbook Pro announcement. Although Fusion isn’t natively compatible on Apple’s new M1 chipset architecture yet, Rosetta 2 should enable you to run Fusion*. We will be sure to keep you posted on our progress towards support of Apple’s new line of chipsets.   

-  
   
* While much of Fusion 360 works as expected under Rosetta 2, we discovered that some Fusion 360 components were not yet compatible. If you run Fusion 360 using Rosetta 2, you may experience issues in these areas:  

·         Switching Team Hubs in the Data Panel  

·         Insert from McMaster-Carr  

·         Explore Generative Design and Electronics Cooling Simulation results  

·         ECAD Tool Libraries and Content Manager  

·         Local Simulation Solves utilizing NASTRAN  

If you rely on the impacted areas for your work, we recommend you to stay on Intel-based Macs until we have these issues sorted out.   

[MarcoDaRos_12]

Thank you for the nice reply 🙂 this kind of simple updates are what we users are asking for, thank you!

[MarcoDaRos_12]

Keep going with the good work! 

[georgeturner308]

is there any estimated time yet on when a public beta or final release will come out.

[pekka.witick]

Can't wait. M1 version is really slow and behaves quite erratically, especially getting up from sleep.

[1Macaddict]

I haven't seen any performance issues or any real difference from my previous MacBook Pro prior to moving to a M1 Max. Of course it may depend on what you are doing and your workflow but it's been good for what I do.

As far as the waking up from sleep, you may want to check the setting under: Setting - Battery - Power Adapter - "Wake for network access" be sure it is checked. I had issues when waking from sleep and this solved it for me.

[copumpkin]

Are there betas we can sign up for to test the native builds? I'd be willing to put up with bugs and incomplete functionality to have a smoother UI, since I mostly do fairly basic things. Or if not a beta, is there anything we can do as end users to help speed it up?

As a developer, I'm guessing that a big chunk of the challenge is that fairly esoteric components like specific CAM toolpaths are shipped as libraries from third parties and those third parties mostly don't care about macOS. If that's the case, I wonder if there could be a "semi-ported" workflow where instead of linking to libraries, the unported code could run in a (rosetta-handled) subprocess and talk to the main process via IPC. That way the core interaction workflows could all be native and the occasional more esoteric component would still run via translation. Now if the issue is indeed with QT or some other core/essential component then what I'm saying probably won't work.

[claytonWYNP7]

@lance.carocci 

Do we have any update on a native M1 build yet?

[lance.carocci]

@claytonWYNP7, the extent of my knowledge is that development is ongoing. When something is available to test, the quickest way to hear about it will be via the Fusion 360 Insider program.

[stevemR7QS6]

I know you guys are working on it - so so tired of my beach-balling Fusion360 on my M1 Mac :(. We pay a premium to use Fusion360 and it's a great product but if it becomes unusable there's no point. More resources on the M1 native port please 🙂

[TrippyLighting]

Please open a new thread and post a beachball" case with model screenshots etc.

Native support might bring 25% ,but even it it would be 50% it is unlikely to help much with spinning beachballs.

[P.IM]

Assuming this is still the "official" thread––7 whole months without an update on progress and this hardware was released to the public 18 months ago... This is my first week into using this software, but have put in probably 50 hours, watching tutorials, and working on a project. Have hit one roadblock after another. It barely runs on my current Intel MBP Retina (2.6 GHz i7, 16GB ram, macOS 10.15.7). I'm not going to buy a high end PC to use 1 app. I'm definitely never going to "upgrade" to a paid license if my experience continues as it has. I truly wish I had good things to say, but the annoyances don't stop. If you want to address the hobbyist/maker market, I guarantee a massive percentage of that market is Mac users. It feels like Autodesk simply does not prioritize us. It's blatant.

(Another note––make it significantly more intuitive. Most hobbyists and makers are likely coming from Adobe apps, which are the standard for visual design. Aligning, creating joints, [supposedly] rigid groups [that are in no way rigid]. None of this can be successfully performed with existing expertise in visual design. The number of times I've gone looking for a menu item that really really seemed like it should have been there, and wasn't... The number of times I've attempted to create a joint only to have a piece of a "rigid" group leave its "rigid" group (yes, clicking in the right order, but this shouldn't have an affect on the rigidity of a group, anyway)... The number of times this sw has crashed when selecting a linked component and its mirror or copy... The number of times I've selected something and hit delete, and nothing at all happens (!!!)... The list is endless and grows every few minutes. Not exaggerating. It's mind-blowing. The fact that I have to Google nearly every. single. thing. I. try. to. do. I might legitimately lose my mind trying to learn this sw. For me, this is truly harder than learning to code from scratch (as I have been doing), and I have nearly 2 decades of graphic design experience and am quite computer savvy in general. I don't mean to sound arrogant or entitled, but I strongly feel like this shouldn't be so counterintuitive, given my domains of experience. I can generally figure out what I need to do in any software I'm using in about 15 minutes, even if it requires a little Googling.

But if you don't care about the hobbyist/maker market, and expanding your user base massively as 3d printing becomes the norm, then keep doing exactly what you're doing, Autodesk. I guess folks like me will just look elsewhere.)

In anticipation of all the proud, "expert," haters out there––this is my opinion, and yes I am entitled to being heard. Just like you. If I was a sw company, as much as I'd hate to see a comment like this, I'd listen. Maybe there's a crowd of folks who feel the same (or maybe I'm stupid). If Autodesk wasn't trying to address this market, I would have no argument here. But I'll never understand why you wouldn't design for an end-user, and do your damnedest to not make them think. Designed for pros or not. It appears there was zero effort to make the user think less. Remember, the computer isn't the thing, it's the thing that gets you to the thing. This software is written like the computer is the thing. But, again, maybe I'm just stupid. I'm sure someone here will let me know.

[TrippyLighting]

s@P.IM other than some perceived performance problems I don't really see what your post has to do with this thread.

Until most recently I've  been using a 2017 MacBook Pro for my Fusion 360 work, professionally, for private projects and to help out here on the forum. Before 2017 I used a mid 2010 iMac. Very rarely have I run into performance problems. There  a couple of areas that need performance improvements (sketch engine for example), but based on my rather intense comparisons between Windows and MacOS (on the same machine) there is almost no performance difference between Win10 and MacOS.

Based on my experience here on the forum, the vast majority of performance problems boil down to bad modeling practices.

Fusion 360 has been adopted readily and rapidly, particularly in the hobbyist and maker community.

Many of the  Fusion 360 team member use Apple computers!

It would probably a good idea to open a new thread and post one of your problematic designs and ask for help.

[davidcuesta76]

"Assuming this is still the "official" thread––7 whole months without an update on progress and this hardware was released to the public 18 months ago... "

I was following along and agreeing with @P.IM one the above, but then I feel like it went strangely off topic. I agree that we need an update, and we need to be able to use Fusion 360 on M1 chips especially if we are paying for it. 

M1 chips are not going away anytime soon, and 18 months is quite a long time since architecture change to still be running old chips.

However I've been using Fusion on a 2015 Macbook Pro for years with all the latest updates and it runs very smoothly. 

3D software is not the same thing as Adobe. Never will be. If you are 1 week into the software. Then keep at it, it gets easier over time, but that really has nothing to do with wether it is compatible with M1 chip.

I've not tired the rosetta version yet, and just got a new M1 MacbookPro, so please Autodesk, lets port this over, as Fusion is a key part of our toolkit, and would be great to utilise the raw power of the M1.

Thanks

[davidZ8URT]

More than 2 Years of transition and second version of apple silicon and Autodesk isn't willing to support M1 Macs. That's a shame.
Time to leave Fusion and AutoDesk and spend money and time with competitors which does have a development team.

[Phil.E]

You might have missed the news that we are working to support M1. It takes time, but we've been working on it for this whole duration.

[TrippyLighting]

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@davidZ8URT wrote:

More than 2 Years of transition and second version of apple silicon and Autodesk isn't willing to support M1 Macs. That's a shame.

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And you came to that conclusion after spending some time reading through this thread?

[claytonWYNP7]

Some kind of progress update would probably go a long way.

Maybe you guys need a service like MacStadium.

If you need an introduction let me know.

[bentwookie]

It's been two years since dev kits went out. Apple's already onto M2. Even Adobe managed to get their crusty apps ported in this time. There's some kind of odd hang up here that doesn't make sense. 

At this point, Autodesk should at least provide more visibility into some kind of timeline. Are we talking months? Years?

[claytonWYNP7]

I totally agree.  This needs to become a bigger priority.

[davidZ8URT]

Hello Phil,
thanks for your reply, I didn't miss the "news". 
Still no schedule, still nothing.
You guys are on the wrong side of the schedule when even Adobe is faster than you in adopting their software.
You just take money from customers and tell them to use Rosetta2 for a while and then you deliver nothing, sorry, I'm done with this kind of business.