Dragon needs to get its hooks into your operating system in order to function properly if the conversion doesn’t work, there won’t be a fix coming. Whether this can be successfully emulated to run on the new Apple Silicon, however, is a lottery. The last version, Dragon Professional Individual for Mac 6.0.8, is now over two years old and is only officially compatible with High Sierra (although plenty of people still have it working just fine on more recent versions of macOS). This almost certainly won’t be the case for Dragon, though. Most of the Mac programs you use on an Intel device will continue to work just fine, they say, on an M1 chip until newer, fully optimised versions arrive. That means they can’t run your old Mac software unless it is “emulated”, something Apple states their new Big Sur operating system can do via their Rosetta 2 conversion trickery. The new ARM chips are not compatible with the x86 instruction set found in Intel processors. Apple can now make strides in both speed and battery life. With M1 (and future chip designs), that all changes. For years, razor-thin Apple devices have been hampered by Intel’s hot, power-hungry chips.

This is hugely beneficial for Apple – they get to take all of their chip manufacturing in-house, not relying on Intel or anyone else for supply or making progressive leaps forward in speed or efficiency. That’s because Apple’s M1 chip is based on ARM architecture, similar to the processors you will find in your iPhone or iPad. With these new chips, both of these options may have hit a brick wall. Most people have been getting by with using their old copy or had made the leap to running the Windows version via a Parallels virtual machine (VM) or similar. While this could represent a huge leap forward for the Mac platform, it’s significantly problematic for any Mac users of Dragon dictation software.Īs we all know, Nuance discontinued Dragon for the Mac platform back in 2018. Well, that day has come: new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini models have landed sporting the new M1 chip.

They announced this back in June and confidently claimed the first Apple Silicon machines would arrive before year end. One thing we all knew, however, was that Apple was planning to replace Intel chips in all Macs over the course of a two-year period. To say 2020 has been unpredictable is an understatement.

Dictation on mac air