Steam Native for Apple Silicon: Better play on the Mac better

The time has come in November: Then Apple Silicon celebrates his fifth birthday on the Mac. At the same time, the Intel age at Apple is coming to an end: MacOS 26 will be the last version of the MAC operating system that still runs on computers with the old chip. It is all the more surprising that the known not yet small software manufacturer Valve has not yet managed to port his gaming client Steam to Apple’s arm computers. Instead, its MacOS app has been using Apple’s in-house X86 translation layer Rosetta 2. But also with the Valve Corporation, one is now believers: the game group from Bellevue, Washington, is working on an Apple Silicon version of Steam for MacOS.

Crashes, but less lags

The happy customer spreads Valve on his official beta website. Because the brand new client is not yet final, but only available in a pre -version. The first version of the Steam client, which runs natively under Apple Silicon, was released on June 12th. However, it was not really stable: in the following beta of June 16, a first crash bug had to be remedied, two betas continued (on June 18, i.e. yesterday), the updates made updates impossible. The only solution for this: Forcing app termination and restart the app.

It is not yet known when the Steam client Final Apple-Silicon-Native will appear. However, the beta already has advantages: it starts much faster and even navigation through the application, i.e. library and valve store, is more responsive. Incidentally, internally, it is chromium code, which should have made the porting of X86 to arm easier, but that was apparently not the case here.

Beta may be tested

The Steam client only serves to find and acquire new games and then install (possibly externally) and manage. The actual games can in turn use their own architecture.

Fortunately, numerous titles available via Steam have long been adapted for Apple Silicon. So that you can try the new client, you first have to become part of the beta program. This goes through the settings. But be careful: the download is over 200 MByte.