Update (14 January 2021): Stata’s Apple Silicon support has been fully tested on M1 Macs and is no longer in beta.

Update (23 November 2020): We stated earlier that nonuniversal versions of Stata/MP would not run on Macs with Apple Silicon. This was based on our experience with attempting to run a nonuniversal version of Stata/MP on an Apple developers kit that contained an A14 SOC (system on chip) instead of an M1 SOC. However, we have since obtained a production Mac Mini with an M1 SOC and have found that nonuniversal versions of Stata/MP will in fact run on Macs with Apple Silicon.

Apple has announced the first set of Macs that are transitioning to Apple Silicon. Apple claims that Macs with Apple Silicon promise better performance and longer battery life than the previous generations of Macs. This will be of great interest to our Stata-for-Mac users, many of whom use Mac laptops.

For the past few months, StataCorp has been working on porting Stata to Apple Silicon using a Developer Transition Kit provided by Apple. We are pleased to announce that Stata 16 has been updated to run natively on Apple Silicon and will be available as a free update. We would like to properly test Stata on a real Mac with Apple Silicon before making it officially available. However, we understand that many of our users will be eager to try it, which is why we’re putting out Apple Silicon support as an early beta. This beta will be available for free to all Stata 16 users immediately. Existing Stata 16 users can simply update within Stata, and Stata will install a Universal application that will run on Macs with Apple Silicon as well as Macs with Intel processors. After today, the Stata-for-Mac installer will also include the Apple Silicon update. Even though Apple Silicon support is in beta, we still certified it against our extensive suite of tests in statistics, graphics, and data management.

Stata 15 and earlier releases of Stata for Mac will run on Macs with Apple Silicon, but they’ll run much slower under emulation translation than if run natively. We recommend that you upgrade to Stata 16 if you wish to run Stata on a Mac with Apple Silicon.

[1] Stata/MP will not run on Macs with Apple Silicon even under emulation unless you have the version that includes Apple Silicon support. Stata 16 users that have an earlier version of Stata/MP will have to manually download and install Stata/MP. Stata 15 or earlier users will have to either upgrade to Stata 16 or use Stata/SE.