Sketchup 2017 on Apple Silicon/Rosetta?

Has anyone tried running Sketchup Pro 2017 on a mac with Apple Silicon via Rosetta? A big ask I suppose.

I don’t have an Apple Silicon Mac so I can’t test this specifically. Perhaps someone else who has one will chime in.

But I can tell you that this combination is not supported by Trimble, so if you run into problems nobody there will be able to help you.

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I don’t know about Rosetta, but I can say that Sketchup Make 2017 runs fine on a Mac mini 2020 apple M1 chip. Except… text and dimensions display upside down and backwards. Aargh. Otherwise all good. I don’t know if Rosetta will fix this.

If it does it already uses Rosetta. Rosetta is an emulator that enables old Intel Mac applications to run on a M1 chip. There is no M1 version of SketchUp 2017.

I did report the problem to Apple a couple of years ago. It seems to only affect M1 Macs running external monitors, which would have to be the case for a Mac mini. I don’t think Apple will fix the problem, and I know SketchUp won’t release an update to 2017 to work around the problem.

I find that 2017 doesn’t last all day in macOS Ventura, where it might last for a good while in Monterey. So long as you’re relying on 2017 working, you might want to stay on Monterey.

In case anyone is curious - I just got my Mac Mini (M2 Pro, OS 13.2.1 Ventura) set up and thought I’d give Sketchup Pro 2017 a try. I was previously running it on a 2015 iMac under Mojave. To my surprise it appeared to run quite well on the Mini, under Rosetta of course. I opened a 300 MB file and all was good. Tools all seemed to work OK. At the peak of my exuberance it crashed w/o warning. This was maybe 5 or 10 minutes after I opened it. Queue the expected, though sad, music.

Colin - I didn’t see your message until just now. It sounds like my experience is similar to yours.

I don’t think the performance running skp 2017 on an M1/M2 Mac would be the best, sketchup 2021 was the las version that runs exclusively under the intel architecture, but if my memory doesn’t fail, I think they had to release an update so it can run better and without issues on arm architecture.

After a couple more weeks of using Sketchup Pro 2017 on my Mac Mini M2 Pro running Ventura (with Rosetta), things seem much more stable than I’d reported earlier. I’ve used it with models up to 800K edges, 300K faces. Quite snappy and hasn’t crashed for a couple weeks now. Go figure.