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Dropbox finally supports M1 Macs natively with new beta

 3 years ago
source link: https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/13/22881547/dropbox-beta-m1-mac-support-macos
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Dropbox finally supports M1 Macs natively with new beta

After promising support last year

By Jon Porter@JonPorty Jan 13, 2022, 3:58am EST

dropbox_logo_2x.0.jpeg

Image: Dropbox

Dropbox’s latest beta has added native support for Macs with M1 processors, 9to5Mac reports. The addition was confirmed by a Dropbox community manager on the company’s forums, and we’ve verified it by installing the latest beta of the macOS app. You can grab it yourselves from this Dropbox forum.

The service has always worked on Apple’s M1 Macs, but until now it’s had to use Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation layer. This allowed the macOS app, which was originally designed for old Intel-based Macs, to run on machines with Apple’s new M1 processors. Offering native M1 support should result in Dropbox having better performance and consuming less power when used with Apple Silicon devices. That said, Rosetta translation is so fast you might not notice a difference in day-to-day use (we haven’t so far).

Dropbox was one of the last high-profile holdouts still lacking support for Apple’s ARM-based processors. In October there was some controversy after forum posts from the company’s employees suggested more customers would have to ask for a native M1 version before the company would develop it. The outcry that followed prompted Dropbox’s CEO to publicly announce that an M1-optimized version of the company’s macOS app would arrive in the first half of 2022.

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There are 20 comments.

Dropbox still a thing? I remember it had some promos like "refer a friend", "be a student" and stuff like that, which bumped my permanent limit to almost 5 GB. (Neat that you could refer your own fake email-address.)

I had ~15 GB most of the time that I did use it, which was around 2011—2016?

Nowadays, Google Google Drive offers 15GB, Microsoft OneDrive offers 5GB and Apple iCloud offers 5GB in their respective free tiers. All of them have some native integration into their respective services, like Word being able to save directly to OneDrive.

So where exactly is the use case for Dropbox?

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 4:10 AM

Forgot to mention: Dropbox offers only 2GB for free.

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 4:53 AM

It’s platform agnostic (runs on Windows, macOS and linux), seamless in it’s integration and it does ONE thing well. All other options either try to do things that I didn’t tell them to (like auto-backing up folders that I don’t want) or cause sync issues when using multiple machines with different accounts logged in. It’s also very fast.

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 5:00 AM

I use GDrive, OneDrive, iCloud and Dropbox.
Dropbox is the fastest and most reliable of them all.

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 5:51 AM

They seem to get by although I do wonder how long until they’ll need to reinvent themselves a bit. Just checked their paid plans and their cheapest offering is 2TB for $18.70 AU a month. Honestly I’m quite surprised that their lowest tier is priced that high and that they don’t have say a 100-500GB plan for $5-$10 or something. I can only assume they’re more interested in targeting business than your casual person looking to store a few GB’s here or there.

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 7:00 AM

Most of Dropbox’s business comes from organizations not consumers.

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 9:42 AM

Like other people already mentioned, they only do this, and they do it well.

I was using it for years, and it is THE best could storage service, but their all or nothing strategy just makes them irrelevant, their free tier is useless, and the ONLY other tier they offer is 2TB at $120/year.

Most people are better off with a free tier, google’s $20/yr 100GB plan, or Microsofts $70/yr 1TB plan, which INCLUDES office.

Too little, too late. I have stopped using it and many users have moved on to the open source Maestral client.

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 5:55 AM

Not at all as convenient and efficient for an overwhelming majority of users.

Does someone have a comprehensive list of M1 compatible apps handy?

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 7:29 AM

Context: Macs were only 7.6% of all PCs sold in 2020 and only 8.5% of all PCs sold in 2021. (Also most Macs sold in 2020-2021 were clearly Intel models.) You can’t tell this by the heavily disproportionate coverage that The Verge and other media outlets give MacBooks over such products like Lenovo Yoga, HP Envy and Dell Inspiron – all of which outsell Apple’s #1 PC, the MacBook Air, by a good margin – but few people actually buy MacBooks. It is funny: they give heavily disproportionate attention to the Dell XPS – a number of sites including this one refer to it as "the most important Windows PC" – when the XPS is at most Dell’s 3rd best selling line after Inspiron and the Dell G (their non-AlienWare gaming line). Why? Because – despite not being the most powerful, top selling or most innovative Windows laptop – the XPS is the laptop that most closely resembles the MacBook. Which is why the media covers it a lot more than laptops that far more people actually use.

So this is why it has taken so long for Dropbox – and a bunch of other software – to release M1 versions. The truth is that only a very tiny percentage of their customer base uses M1 Macs. Consider that Mac’s market share ranges from 4% to 10% in any given year and M1 Macs have only been on the market since mid-November 2020 then it would be a shock if – content creator applications and Apple’s first party software excluded – the M1 Mac customer base of any given app is greater than 1%.

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 8:57 AM

Macs are given disproportionate attention in blogs because a disproportionate amount of creators (designers, developers, video folks) use them for work. And creators are a veeeery squeaky wheel.

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 9:45 AM

Why on earth would you think a majority if macs sold in 2021 were intel?

Noone in their right mind would buy an intel mac after the M1’s were released.

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 1:08 PM

products like Lenovo Yoga, HP Envy and Dell Inspiron – all of which outsell Apple’s #1 PC, the MacBook Air, by a good margin

:smile: Nope.

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 2:13 PM

I won’t call this a non-story, but I keep hearing about this as a problem and it hasn’t been one. Dropbox works great on M1. Would optimization be nice? Sure! But the lack of optimization has had little to no impact on my Mac’s performance and battery life.

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 9:41 AM

they took ages I moved to iCloud Drive

Every other cloud sync service has issues, and I’ve tried them ALL. And I mean: ALL. Not just OneDrive, GDrive, iCloud, but Box, Tresorit…

Dropbox has gotten crufty and I am absolutely uninterested in their other shit (password manager, cloud collab doc thingy [though Paper IS a very nice text editor]), but they are still A+ #1 when it comes to: reliably sync my shit across ALL devices without issue, and let me share from that store easily.

So I stick with them. Glad to have a native app for my Macs now too.

Posted  on Jan 13, 2022 | 1:30 PM

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