That being said, there exist tutorials online where people have explained how to get Minecraft to run natively online, so clearly it cannot be *too* much of a challenge. Or perhaps they just have just had their hands full with 1.17. It could very well be that Mojang is waiting on on the developers of one of Minecraft's dependencies to port their code first.

Some of the major packages have not ported their code yet not because they are lazy or snubbing Mac users, but because those packages require a Fortran compiler, which so far does not exist for MacOS ARM64. For instance, I do a lot of work with Python data science packages.

The pipeline for porting software to new platforms and architectures can often involve waiting on the developers of the software's dependencies updating their software first. I do not think they are trying to passive aggressively ignore anything. My question is this: Does Mojang plan on releasing a MacOS ARM64 version of Minecraft Java (both the launcher and the actual game) in the near future? Have they said anything publicly about this at all? How would we know if such a thing is released and how would we update Minecraft accordingly? Would it appear in a changelog for new Minecraft version, or would we have to re-install Minecraft? Would the launcher and game just automatically do this when a new Minecraft version comes out? This seems understandable, as I imagine Mojang has their hands full working on the Caves and Cliffs update.

Several other products provided by Microsoft, like Microsoft Office and Visual Studio Code, released MacOS ARM64 versions months ago, but Minecraft seems to be somewhat lagging behind. Programs written for the old x86 architecture (including Minecraft) can still be run through the binary translation program Apple provides (Rosetta 2), but this comes at roughly a 20-30% performance hit (supposedly), so clearly a native release version would be preferable. The first generation of these chips is called M1. For those of you who do not know, last November, Apple began transitioning all of their laptop and desktop devices to CPUs with ARM64 instruction set architectures.

Minecraft for macbook air m1