Two years later, Autodesk Maya and AutoCAD became native to Apple Silicon.

It’s been two years and four months since the first Apple Silicon Mac hit the market, and now Autodesk has finally updated some of its hugely popular professional applications (AutoCAD and Maya) to natively run on the M1 and M2 chips.

The availability of AutoCAD for Mac 2024 was announced in a blog post on the Autodesk website on March 28th. Like other major AutoCAD updates, it adds new features such as enhanced automation tools and simplified workflows, but the announcement that “for the first time, AutoCAD for Mac 2024 and AutoCAD LT for Mac 2024 now natively run on both Intel and Apple architectures Silicon, including the M1 and M2 chips in the M-series chips.”

AutoCAD is widely used in various industries and crafts, including architecture, urban planning, and industrial design.

A day later, on March 29, Autodesk unveiled a 2024 update for Maya, its 3D modeling software primarily used for game development, film production, and visual effects. Maya 2024 offers native support for Apple Silicon in addition to a host of new features, including the LookDevX material editor, Hydra support, and more.

But unlike many other makers of widespread professional software in similar industries, such as Adobe and Unity, Autodesk’s efforts to support Apple Silicon, announced two years ago, have continued indefinitely. Even the open source Maya competitor Blender has surpassed Autodesk.

The Intel versions of Maya and AutoCAD worked fine in Rosetta, but some Mac users have become understandably frustrated over the past couple of years, and Autodesk has never explained why it took so long.

However, he is here now. We were able to download Maya 2024 for free with an existing subscription and confirmed that it works as an Apple Silicon app on a MacBook Pro with M2 Max.