World of Warcraft already supports Apple silicon and M1 Macs

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World Of Warcraft Shadowlands
World Of Warcraft Shadowlands (Image credit: Blizzard)

What you need to know

  • Apple's M1-powered Macs are already supported by the popular World of Warcraft game.

Buying a brand new M1-powered Mac and keen to jump back into World of Warcraft? No problem, Blizzard has your back – WoW has already been updated to run natively on Apple silicon.

Blizzard made the announcement in a forum post, saying that the latest patch adds support for native ARM64. Or Apple silicon, if you prefer.

With this week's patch 9.0.2, we're adding native Apple Silicon support to World of Warcraft. This means that the WoW 9.0.2 client will run natively on ARM64 architecture, rather than under emulation via Rosetta.We're pleased to have native day one support for Apple Silicon.While our testing has been successful, we're highly aware of the nature of day one support with updates like this. Please let us know if you run into any issues that may be related to Apple Silicon in our Mac Technical Support forum.

If early M1-powered Mac reviews are any indication there's a very real chance that the new MacBook Air might be the machine you want for your portable World of Warcraft gaming needs!

Do you have one of the new Apple silicon Macs? I'd love to know how well those things run WoW. Or any game, for that matter!

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.