Good to know there‘s still activity here. What are trustworthy organizations to donate to? I’ll gladly send something on your behalf.
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From the Apple WWDC 2020 - Platforms State of the Union: at minute 20:40 of the presentation Blender is among the Open Source projects that Apple will help to transition to the new ARM based platform. Maybe we will end having Metal support with the help of Apple? I hope 
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If that is their goal, I hope the Blender Foundation finds a long lasting agreement with them.
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I’m so excited to see Apple’s contribution! This seems to be focused on Apple Silicon compatibility and not necessarily providing Metal implementation, but I’d love to be proven wrong lol
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This is almost certainly just about ARM and not Metal. Blender already builds on ARM64 for Linux, so changes might just be a handful of build system tweaks. I’d love to be proven wrong though.
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It would be astounding if they had silently done the large amount of work to do Metal without getting advice or help from anyone here. I agree, this is almost certainly about ARM. But it is nice to see that our app is enough on their mind that they publicize making it runnable in such a prominent place.
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“We are also passionate about making sure that open source projects thrive on the Mac, especially if they benefit the larger software developer community, and can help accelerating the port of other software packages. So we have already done the initial work for the more widely used open source projects, to help the community get started. And we will be publishing patches to them in the next days”
This a direct quote from the video. The section was entirely focused on the transition to Apple Silicon.
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I was wondering about that too…thinking to myself, “Are they silently following Blender’s progress?”
They obviously know where to get builds, the source code etc. etc.
Are they watching “Blender Today” every week with similar enthusiasm? @pablovazquez
Are they browsing this dev forum? 
I guess we’ll find out more in the coming weeks.
Yes, I’m Tim Cook but not that one.
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Drew’s progress seems very very interesting! I created an account just so I can bookmark this conversation because it’s very promising.
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I moved back from macOS to Windows around early 2019, when Cycles was forced to cease macOS GPU rendering support. For the first time since that time I’m excited about Apple news.
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I would be suprised if you are proven wrong, Apple helping Blender to transition to Metal sounds too good to be true. Transition to ARM is very tiny work in comparison. MacOS and iOS are nothing more than marketing products, the real APPLE OS is Dwarwin and it has been able to build for ARM processors since the dawn of the iPhone as it forms the core of both iOS and MacOS, which is why Steve Jobs presented iOS at that iconic first presentation as nothing more than MacOS with extra stuff. So Apple’s transition to ARM processors has always been a no brainer for them.
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Quick update: still working on this! Just had some crazy work schedule since WWDC ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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Just wanted to say thank you for everyone who’s involved in this. I love to use Blender in my design but I also love MacOS. Now I can handle this on High Sierra with an external gtx1070. But I really want to move on up to date system with up to date hardware. Can’t wait that day!
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I watched multiple sessions from this year’s WWDC WRT Metal. Are any of the advancements making it easier to implement here? Thank you for your efforts DrewFitz! Lot of great new stuff in the pipeline here like particles / physics / new sky and it would be awesome for Mac users to benefit from those in the native renderer, not have to use 3rd party. Not that ProRender and now Octane X aren’t going to be good options. But they’ll never be as fully integrated as Cycles is (in theory).
[Not only that but if Metal version were fully integrated at some point as an option, presumably that is a big boost for anyone who uses Cycles4D as part of an X-Particles workflow in C4D. Certainly everyone stands to win by this happening. Thanks again.]
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There’s possibly some new Metal stuff that would help, but most of it wouldn’t be applicable unless the deployment target for Blender was bumped up to Big Sur, which I doubt would be acceptable. From what I’ve discovered so far, the Cycles internals are generally designed to use the common features across GPGPU platforms (OpenCL, CUDA) which Metal already supports.
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I’ll join the cheer section! I would say I can’t believe you’re putting so much effort into something like this for the community, but this IS the Blender community after all…
Even if somehow it all ends up not working out, the fact that you’ve done as much as you have is pretty meaningful. Thank you, DrewFitz!
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I’m interested in helping out on this (if @DrewFitz needs/wants help). I used to write mac software back in the day and am returning to it now after 15 years of web/server development.
Have already been diving in Blender for some other Mac issues (with my graphics tablet).
No promises, but I am going to look at github and see.
But…thank you for doing this. Would love something that actually gets the power out of my mac!
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Metal support will be awesome. I’m working on MacBook Pro with eGPU/Radeon RX 5700 XT connected.
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Until Cycles for Metal is completed, you might want to try Radeon ProRender, which is already optimized for Metal and AMD GPUs.
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I’ve tried ProRender. It appears not to support video textures and also my world environment text (an image) doesn’t show in renders. Or at least that’s what happens on my mac.
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