- The last beta steam natively works on Apple Silicon
- Apple removes the Rosetta 2 compatibility layer
- Games should work more easily and more efficiently
After the WWDC 2025, we had a burst of Apple advertisements this week, including the news that MacOS Tahoe 26 will be the latest version to support the Mac Intel – and directly on Cue, Steam finally delivered a version of its client which natively runs on Apple silicon.
Check the publication notes for the last beta of the Steam client (via PC gamer), and you will see the very important news that “the Steam Client and Steam Helper applications are now running natively on Apple Silicon” included in the update details.
Until now, Steam for MacOS has always been coded for Intel X86 chipsets, rather than the ARM fleas developed by Apple itself – which has meant that on Macs of series M, the customer has worked on the Rosetta 2 compatibility layer that Apple provides.
In addition to removing the Intel Chipset support, leaving the older Macs on MacOS 26, MacOS 27 next year will be the latest version to support Rosetta 2, Apple announced to WWDC 2025. This means that the developers will have to publish coded versions of their applications.
How to try it now
For those of us who are not interested in the architecture of the chipset or the compatibility layers, this simply means that Steam on MacOS games should work more efficiently and gently – think of faster image frequencies and better battery life, overall.
You should also find the Steam customer launches faster and is more responsive when used on Mac. Much of this is due to the user interface based on the chrome natively working on ARM, rather than having to be translated.
If you want to try the beta version now, you can do it – the usual warnings with beta software apply here, in the sense that you may notice more bugs than normal, and some of your games can be glitchy, but that the problems should be resolved over time.
From the Steam application on your Mac, choose Steam> Preferences> InterfaceThen click on the No chosen beta version drop -down menu to the right of Customer beta participation Header: you can then select Steam Beta update To reach the beta version.
