- Sketch 70 should be universal / ARM-native since the beta is, sketch 69 is intel / Rosetta (not on M1, but this info is in system information utility). The new UI features in Sketch 70 only works on XCode 12 iirc, which builds universally anyways by default.
- According to the last update on SketchUp website, M1 is supported: We have determined that SketchUp is running stable on the ‘Apple Silicon’ hardware that powers Apple’s 2021 Mac devices. Currently, SketchUp is supported by Apple’s Rosetta translation service on this hardware.
- Sketch is an innovative and fresh look at vector drawing. Its intentionally minimalist design is based upon a drawing space of unlimited size and layers, free of palettes, panels, menus, windows, and controls. Though simple to use, it offers powerful vector drawing and text tools like perfect Boolean operations, symbols, and powerful rulers, guides, Sketch,.
Ten years after the first release of Sketch, a lot has changed. The design tools space has grown. Our amazing community has, too. Even macOS itself has evolved. But one thing has remained the same: our love for developing a truly native Mac app.
Native apps bring so many benefits — from personalization and performance to familiarity and flexibility. And while we’re always working hard to make Cloud an amazing space to collaborate, we still believe the Mac is the perfect place to let your ideas and imagination flourish.
I finally got my brand new M1 13' MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM, so decided to test it in Sketch on a couple of very complex files. I tested it against my 201.
In this post, we thought we’d highlight just a few of the benefits that come with native macOS apps.
It’s the things you see…
When you use a truly native app, you get all the benefits that come as standard with the platform — and for macOS, there are plenty! You can work across multiple windows, or in multiple tabs. You can manage your own local files in Finder, and browse back through previous versions saved on your Mac’s built-in storage. Then there’s Time Machine, which helps you keep a full history of your local files in case you want to revert to a much older layout, grab an important Symbol you accidentally deleted months ago, or just keep a full backup of all your work from v1.0 to your finished file.
Then there are the built-in customization options. Want to tweak a shortcut for a tool you use regularly, or add a new shortcut entirely? Take advantage of macOS’ custom keyboard shortcuts and create your own from System Preferences — putting your favorite Sketch features at your fingertips. Plus, it’s easy to completely customize your toolbar with a Ctrl-click, just like you would in Finder or Mail. Learn the method once and it’s easy to put the tools you need the most easily within reach. When it comes to personalizing your app to suit your workflow and preferences, native apps have the controls you need.
We think the best way to design is in a truly native application, built beautifully — and made for macOS.
Best of all, native Mac apps like ours are designed to fit with the rest of the operating system. It’s hard to quantify, but if you use Apple’s built-in apps you immediately get a ‘feel’ for how things should work in native apps. When an app ‘fits in’ with the rest of the OS, it doesn’t just look and feel more at home on your Mac — it lowers the learning curve when you first open it. That’s why we (and plenty of other great macOS developers) work hard to follow the conventions set out in Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, so that our Mac app has that same, familiar feel. And you can start using it instantly, from the first click.
This is something we pride ourselves on — over the years we’ve taken design cues from Apple, working hard to make your experience feel consistent and natural whenever you switch from our Mac app to apps like Pages or Keynote. We support UI changes, such as Dark Mode, as they launch. And right now we’re putting the finishing touches to a major UI update so that our Mac app will still look perfectly at home when macOS Big Sur releases later this Fall.
…and the ones you don’t.
Of course, for all the obvious features that you can see and use every day, there are dozens more that help make native Mac apps better to use. You may not always know about them, but these behind-the-scenes benefits are one of the biggest reason we continue to champion a truly native app.
It starts with native macOS technologies. Building our app with the likes of Metal and Swift makes a big difference to things like rendering, performance and our memory footprint, too. Curse of vanishing minecraft. And we’re continuing to improve things in both of these areas — the updates we made with version 67 are one example.
Native Mac apps can offer a better user experience by building on top of Apple’s tried and tested frameworks, improving everything from battery life to accessibility.
As a native app, we can easily support OpenType font features and P3 color profiles (because Apple does), so your designs look their best. Plus, our Mac app works with OS extensions and actions, like the ability to look up words or search with Google with a Ctrl-click — without needing any workarounds.
Plus, one of the biggest benefits is the option to use your native apps anywhere — even when you don’t have an internet connection. We’ll still need you to go online to confirm your license, but once that check is complete you can jump onto a long-haul flight, hike up a mountain or just switch off Wi-Fi on your Mac and keep designing in Sketch until long after the sun goes down.
This isn’t just about us, though. Every native Mac app can offer a better user experience by building on top of Apple’s tried and tested frameworks, giving you everything from better performance and improved battery life to world-class accessibility.
It all comes down to choice.
For us, the ultimate benefit of being a native macOS app is that it puts the choice in your hands. Like we said above, we’re always working hard to make Cloud a great place to collaborate, but if you need to work locally in a native application on your own Mac, you always have the option. And if you prefer to store your design files on your Mac’s hard drive, a shared file server or an enterprise Box setup, you can.
The same goes for backups. Of course we’ll keep your files safe and secure if you store them in Cloud, but you can always keep a local version too, if you want. Want to stay in control of which version of Sketch you’re working with? We get it, sometimes you don’t want to update your tools close to a deadline — we do the same with Xcode ;-). Just stick with your current version until you’re ready to update. The moment you’re ready, you’ll get all the performance improvements and latest features (like Color Variables and real-time collaboration — which is coming soon) that each new release brings.
We want to give you the best of all worlds. The latest features delivered directly to a native Mac app, with all the functional benefits that brings. The ability to choose how and where you work. The option to share your work and handoff to others in Cloud. And soon, the ability to collaborate in real-time.
Ultimately, the choice is in your hands. We want to give you the best of all worlds. The latest features in a native Mac app, with all the functional benefits that brings. The ability to choose how and where you work. The option to share your work and handoff to others in Cloud. And soon, the ability to collaborate in real-time.
We simply couldn’t do this without being a native Mac app. macOS is an amazing platform to work on, and we’re grateful to the community of designers like you that use Macs every day to create amazing work. Thank you for supporting us, and all the other native apps that help make the Mac the platform it is today. And thank you, Apple, for giving us a place to call home.
Earlier this month, Apple finally announced its new M1 chip, and gave us some mind-blowing numbers to demonstrate how fast its three new Macs really are. Naturally, we were excited to get our hands on a new machine to test these performance claims for ourselves — and see just how Sketch would run on this new hardware.
Measuring performance objectively across machines in an application as interactive as Sketch isn’t easy. Recording side-by-side operations produced some notable differences — browsing through complicated Sketch documents was at least 40% faster in our measurements, for example — and in an unscientific way everything felt faster. But we could never be sure whether other factors were at play.
But then we realized that we had another way to put the new Macs through their paces — a more objective, measurable way.
A Mac mini server farm
At Sketch, the Mac mini holds a special place in our heart. We operate a server farm of 19 Mac minis. Together, they process over 60,000 Sketch documents every day — for developer handoff, asset exporting, web previews, and our upcoming live collaboration feature. And as you can imagine, speed and performance make a huge difference here.
We wanted to know if the M1 chip would speed up our operations and ultimately make the experience of using Sketch even better as a result. To help us figure that out, we conducted three separate tests.
Measuring overall performance
First, let’s set the scene. For this test, we ordered the entry-level 2020 Mac mini, featuring an Apple M1 Chip with 8GB of RAM. Its purchase price is $699.
We’re comparing this machine with those that are currently running our render farm; the 2018 Mac mini, with 3.2 GHz Intel Core i7 processors and 32GB RAM. You can still buy this model today, starting at $1,299 for the same processor and 8GB RAM1.
To test performance, we took a number of complex Sketch documents, loaded them up, then exported a few hundred images out of each document2. This gives us a nice variety of ‘disk’ activity, memory usage, CPU usage and GPU usage to help us compare the machines.
And how did they compare?
The results were impressive and confirmed our less scientific observations from earlier. The Mac minis currently running our render farm are the top-of-the-line model from 2018, and they were consistently outperformed by 30-40% in our first test compared to the base-line model of the new Mac mini. That’s 30-40% more performance for almost half the price!
It’s worth noting that these tests don’t accurately reflect interactive real-life Sketch use (due to all the disk writing, for example), nor are they designed to test one isolated unit on the chip — like the CPU.
Measuring raw CPU
With that in mind, we decided to run another set of tests to get a better idea of how these two pieces of hardware perform from a raw CPU perspective. In this case we compared the results of a detach operation — we took those same large and complex Sketch files and recursively detached every Symbol instance in each.
Performing this task gave us a better idea of how these two machines compare based almost solely on CPU. And what did we find?
Here, the results are almost identical with the lofty numbers we got from Apple. The new M1 Mac mini was almost twice as fast as our 2018 machine.
Comparing Apples to Apples
In the November event, Apple’s Laura Metz, Mac Product Line Manager, said that the MacBook Air is the world’s best-selling 13-inch notebook, and the company’s best-selling model. So we decided to test against an early 2020 Intel MacBook Air as well (1.1 GHz Intel Core i5 with 8 GB RAM). The Mac mini we’re testing here shares the same M1 chip as the newly released MacBook Air, so although it’s not a perfect comparison, it should be a decent indicator of the performance jump you can expect from the new Air compared to the older model.
And, just for good measure, we decided to throw in a 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro (2.3 GHz Intel Core i9 with 32GB RAM) as well. Because, why not?3
Again, the results are staggering. The 2019 MacBook Pro, as could be expected, easily outpaces the MacBook Air. But then our new Mac mini goes a step further, blowing both of them out of the water. The new Mac mini consistently completed these tasks three times faster than the early 2020 MacBook Air, and twice as fast as the 2019 MacBook Pro.
What it all means
Macbook M1 Sketchup
There’s no doubt about it — these M1 chips are truly amazing. It’s hard to put into words just how much more performance you get from this new generation of Macs compared to even their recent predecessors. Though, these numbers sure help quantify it.
For now, we’re eagerly waiting for Apple to have enough M1 Mac minis available for us to upgrade our server rendering operations. These new machines will help us process documents faster, run Cloud more efficiently, and make our exciting upcoming features better than ever.
Sketch Macbook M18
The best news is that, as a Sketch user, you don’t have to buy a new Mac to feel the benefits of Apple’s M1 chip. We can deliver those improvements by upgrading our servers. And of course, if you are lucky enough to have a new M1 machine, we’ve made sure our Mac app can take advantage of these big performance improvements — so you can create amazing work, faster than ever.
Sketch Macbook M17
This $1,299 model only includes 8GB of RAM — to upgrade to the 32GB RAM model we use in our server farms would cost $1,899. But the tests we’re carrying out here don’t get close to using that much RAM, so we didn’t think it was fair to compare those machines (and prices) specifically. ↩
When using Sketch in real-life, we try to utilize all cores efficiently. In this setup, the workflow is deliberately single-threaded so we can run a lot of these processes together efficiently. Remember, this is not a typical workflow for users — but it is a good reflection of the work we need to do on the server. ↩
The Mac mini we tested has the same chip and speed as the latest M1 MacBook Air — the mini simply has a fan to help heat dissipation. However, these tests wouldn’t cause CPU throttling to kick in had we measured this on an Air. ↩