I understand the frustration when an OS doesn’t have the features you use in an upgrade, I’ve been there myself.
My comment is really aimed towards the OS versions we are likley to support. There has not been a decision yet on which these are, so don’t read into it too much. We want to support as many users as we possibly can - but it is fair to say that we’ll be making sure it will run on the latest versions of macOS.
This isn’t going to be possible for all Mac users (me included) because we have some professional software that still hasn’t been updated for Big Sur and thus (for the moment until we’ve resolved this) we still need to run previous OSs on our Macs (For the record, I have High Sierra on my main Mac and Mojave on my back up - sadly I don’t have the cash to have a Mac solely for running Eve)
Please, please, please keep Wine working for the moment!
Hey, not trying to pick a fight with you, just interested: what professional software does not run under BigSur? I have a Macbook running BigSur that is managed by my company, its pretty up to date with a lot of professional software on it.
This is really exciting news! I am holding off on replacing my 4-year-old MacBook Pro to see what will work well with this new Eve client. Can’t wait to see it!
Thank you for doing this! I use the client on multiple platforms and have noticed significant stability improvements with the Mac OS version over time, but that the renderings are dull when compared to my PC. I’m hoping this change will bring the same rich lighting effects to my Mac.
@Galendil, that’s fine, I’m happy to explain.
In real life, I’m a professional photographer. At the moment I still have around 16,000 images on my Mac that were imported into Aperture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_(software)). It was a great little program until Apple decided to simply pull it, without much of a heads up and without providing any way to export the images (retaining their EXIF data which to professionals like me is vital) into Adobe Lightroom, or Photomechanic or any of the image management bits of software that most professional photographers use.
This is pretty much my life’s work (triple back-ups are in place!) so I cannot screw it up. I love the tech and I’m an Apple loyalist (having used them for well over 30 years now) but my opinion, at least in this regard, towards Apple, needless to say, is fairly frosty.
In terms of other software that’s affected, I also do graphic design for a charity who have a PC server. At this point there is no update for the server interface so that Big Sur can work with it so if I was to update, I couldn’t actually do any work for them.
Don’t get me wrong an ideal solution to this would be to get a dedicated Mac just for Eve, but I don’t have that kind of cash I’m afraid, at least right now after months of earning very little because of Coronavirus.
Looks like a problem you’d raise up with the maker of your “professional” software then, rather than with a completely unrelated game company.
Edit since you clarified what sofware it is - Apple literally provides step by step instructions on how to export all Aperture data to other tools, and that includes EXIF metadata because why wouldn’t it be included.
So asking CCP to not do a new version because one guy can’t be bothered to read an instruction does sound very entitled.
Wow, that is exciting news! I was hoping for years to see a native Mac client happen. And all this when Apple just announced Apple Silicon Macs, exceeding many performance expectations. I’m really super excited about this development. Finally a way for me to play EVE on my Mac again, without needing any fiddly (Streaming-)PC “solutions” or other dedicated gaming hardware.
Thanks a lot CCP!
That’s great, @CCP_Caffeine. I’m excited to see parity with DX11 
What’s it been like to work with Metal? I’d be really interested to learn more about this experience via the DevBlog, if you guys have time to talk about it.
Another question; With us being able to let go of DX9, through this process and embrace parity between DX11 and Metal. Do you envision seeing better cross play between future DX12 focused effects and Metal. A good example might be say, ray tracing support.
really exciting news. Just got an m1 MacBook Pro & it will be fantastic to be able to run Eve on it (it kind of works with a thing called Crossover but it’s a bit flakey). In passing the m1 Mac is definitely still “early adopter” territory but at a lot less “bleeding edge” than I expected. - My biggest complaint is that it doesn’t get warm like older Macs so when my office is cold I have to rest my hands on a cold block of metal…
As an observer, I’d probably suggest, as has been hinted at… bringing native compatibility to macOS would naturally involve decoupling many of the dependencies that made porting it to another platform difficult in the first place. What works to bring it to macOS will inevitably make it easier to support other platforms too, it’s possible that having two rendering backends (DX11/Metal) paves the way for a third such as Vulkan, despite it being a royal PITA to work with.
Asking CCP to commit to a Linux port or support older versions of macOS is very difficult as whilst I’m sure it’s possible, there are a lot of unknown unknowns involved and until they’ve done this they can’t really give you much information anyway even if they said ‘yes’. All I am saying as this is good news for people who care about that.
Apple made no secret of the fact that they were removing support for 32 bit software and as soon as you loaded the final version that would run 32 bit software, it nagged continually when you opened anything that was still 32 bit.
Your complaint should be at the manufacturer of your professional document scanner for being years out of date, not aimed at Apple.
I am wondering as to how this could surpass other priorities over @ the CCP production pipeline but I am excited to see modifications - also encompassing recent ones - that, for the longest time, were claimed to be “impossible” before.
However, as @Petal_Everbloom correctly pointed out, even if the effort to port the client to MacOS is, for the people concerned, mostly pointless, it would lay down the necessary groundwork for a Linux client many enthusiasts were long hoping for.
There’s nothing for me of value to add to the debate on Apple’s policies and I’m almost sure this thread is not intended to be used as such 
This is great news! I was planning to buy the last Intel based iMac and hold on to it for decades so I can bootcamp and run Eve natively. But now I’ll be able to upgrade to Apple Silicon Macs.
So native linux client when?
EVE/CCP Team - this is great news - thank your for making this transition. I have been a Mac user since the 1980’s and been running EVE Online on my Mac for over 10 years…I have never had a problem I couldn’t resolve, ever in Mac OS.
If I can help - I will
Cheers!!
Scooter
Could you shed some light on planned eGPU integration. I have just bought an eGPU to run multiple clients on a 2013 Mac Pro.
Look’s like they are not planning eGPU support at this time @Derma_Titus.
It’s been an interesting turn of events the whole eGPU situation. It’s something I recently discussed with my companies Apple Business rep. Originally we’d been considering getting the Black Magic Pro eGPU to function as docks between MacBook Pro’s and XDR monitors. But when Black Magic dropped this product, we were nervous about Apple’s continued desire to ‘drive eGPU’ forward over the longer term, but we couldn’t work out why.
Now Apple Silicon has surfaced, I think we see what happened; eGPU isn’t supported (there’s nothing to say right now that there won’t be support in the future, but given their position with their SoC’s I’m not sure it adds up). Their strategic position has changed, it makes little sense to support and promote other vendors GPU’s when you’re working to drive your own GPU’s which form part of the SoC solution.
I’m looking forward to see what Apple has planned around graphics processing for their more pro and prosumer products. eGPU has felt, and continues to feel, like an uncertainty until Apple reveals what options will be offer around discrete graphics processing. My gut tells me though that Apple will move away from AMD graphics, and increase pressure on NVIDA’s CUDA over the longer term with Metal. Once you break up core components off the SoC design to support discrete graphics, I’m going to assume you degrade the advantage being leveraged in Apples SoC architecture.
Best news I’ve read all month.
Thank you CCP for always working hard. Might have to come back to EVE soon™!!!
Thank you for the reply, concise and informative. I can, sort of, understand the eGPU thing going forward with silicon but I was hoping ‘native’ Eve would have eGPU compatibility for legacy products as I shall not be replacing any of my 3 mac products within the next 3 years.