Microsoft Remote Desktop updated for Apple Silicon

Microsoft Remote Desktop

Microsoft has released an update to its Remote Desktop app to natively support Apple Silicon on M1 Macs.

Microsoft's long-standing Remote Desktop application lets Mac users connect and use PCs, or virtual Windows apps. Rather than running Windows on the Mac itself, it's a remote connectivity solution which now works natively on M1 Macs.

"In this release we've made some significant updates to the shared underlying code that powers the Remote Desktop experience across all our clients," says Microsoft in its Mac App Store listing.

The most significant update is the native support for M1, but the new release also "addressed macOS 11 compatibility issues." It now requires macOS 10.14 or later.

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10 Comments

dewme

said about 3 years ago

I’ve always been impressed with the performance of Microsoft’s Remote Desktop client app and the underlying RDP protocol. Two things always come to mind when I see it mentioned:

1) To use it you’ll need to have Windows 10 Pro on the remote machine, not Windows 10 Home.
2) Why doesn’t Apple offer a similar app for free to support the same capability for Mac targets? It’s $80 for an app that has a 2-star rating on the App Store.

I know that there are plenty of VNC flavored clients out there for accessing a remote Mac. But once you’ve experienced the performance difference between Microsoft Remote Desktop versus any VNC type of client, you’ll never want to use the latter unless you have no choice.

fahlman

said about 3 years ago

dewme said:

I’ve always been impressed with the performance of Microsoft’s Remote Desktop client app and the underlying RDP protocol. Two things always come to mind when I see it mentioned:

1) To use it you’ll need to have Windows 10 Pro on the remote machine, not Windows 10 Home.
2) Why doesn’t Apple offer a similar app for free to support the same capability for Mac targets? It’s $80 for an app that has a 2-star rating on the App Store.

I know that there are plenty of VNC flavored clients out there for accessing a remote Mac. But once you’ve experienced the performance difference between Microsoft Remote Desktop versus any VNC type of client, you’ll never want to use the latter unless you have no choice.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/share-the-screen-of-another-mac-mh14066/mac

/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Screen Sharing.app

dewme

said about 3 years ago

fahlman said:

dewme said:

I’ve always been impressed with the performance of Microsoft’s Remote Desktop client app and the underlying RDP protocol. Two things always come to mind when I see it mentioned:

1) To use it you’ll need to have Windows 10 Pro on the remote machine, not Windows 10 Home.
2) Why doesn’t Apple offer a similar app for free to support the same capability for Mac targets? It’s $80 for an app that has a 2-star rating on the App Store.

I know that there are plenty of VNC flavored clients out there for accessing a remote Mac. But once you’ve experienced the performance difference between Microsoft Remote Desktop versus any VNC type of client, you’ll never want to use the latter unless you have no choice.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/share-the-screen-of-another-mac-mh14066/mac

/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Screen Sharing.app

This is for a different use case than the one Microsoft Remote Desktop supports. Remote Desktop replaces the interactive Windows session on the target machine with the Remote Desktop client on the remote machine. It’s not screen sharing which is part of the reason it’s so fast. Give it a try.

loopless

said about 3 years ago

Exactly, Windows Remote Desktop on Mac is outstanding, and in some ways better than the Windows client. Is extremely fast and has been a life-saver for remote work from home to office PCs.

dewme

said about 3 years ago

loopless said:

Exactly, Windows Remote Desktop on Mac is outstanding, and in some ways better than the Windows client. Is extremely fast and has been a life-saver for remote work from home to office PCs.

Concur. Being able to remote into multiple sessions and remote directly into VMs on the server/target machine is a big plus. On a LAN or halfway decent internet connection running the RDP client even on a older machine running Linux (remmina) is nearly as fast as running local. I even use it with Raspberry Pi running Ubuntu Mate. It’s been a boon for WFH folks, but I’ve been using it for several years.