The bootloader provides pre-boot functionality to Macs, including choosing your boot target, booting from external or network sources, booting into Target Disk Mode or Recovery mode, resetting NVRAM, or booting into diagnostic mode.Īpple Silicon Macs have a bootloader more like the one iOS and iPadOS use, but it's modified to allow some more traditional Mac features, like handling multiple macOS installs on one or more physical drives, booting multiple versions of macOS on the same computer, and supporting macOS Recovery. Intel Macs boot using an EFI-based bootloader that replaced the older Open Firmware used by PowerPC Macs-Apple was one of the first PC companies to begin using EFI, before it became more common in Windows PCs during the Windows 7 era. All of this will apply to the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini that Apple announced this week, and presumably all the other Apple Silicon Macs that follow Booting and recovery We’ll try to stick to firmware and software features without diving too deep into the actual hardware architecture differences these things are not Big Sur features as such, but since Big Sur will be the first macOS version to run on Apple Silicon Macs, a Big Sur review seems like the best place to document them.
The goal, once an Intel Mac and an Apple Silicon Mac are booted up next to each other, is to make them look the same way and do most of the same things despite the radically different underlying hardware. Apple is modernizing the macOS bootloader and using translation software to allow current x86-64 Mac apps to continue to run while developers develop ARM versions of their apps (or, more likely for a few years, Universal apps that will run on either architecture). Further Reading First ARM-based Mac laptops: MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook ProĪpple’s strategy for ensuring software continuity and a smooth transition relies on essentially the same methods that made the PowerPC-to-Intel transition possible.
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