I've been asked a few times about supporting Laravel Homestead on Apple Silicon, specifically the new M1 ARM architecture. As I mentioned in the Github issue I'm not currently planning on supporting Apple Silicon because I have no intention of buying an M1 laptop anytime soon. Between the cost of a new machine with enough RAM and storage space to facilitate vagrant box building, and the time it would take me to build, test, and release a compatible version (Assuming Vagrant & Providers support Apple Silicon, without them Homestead cannot support the platform.)

I was asked about sponsorship options; I have been thinking about this. I felt like this might be a good time to outline what I'd need to build and support a compatible Homestead version on Apple Silicon M1 machines. Homestead has a lot of users. According to Github's Insights, Homestead has had 3,629 Unique cloners from 11/15 to 11/28. On Vagrant Cloud the Homestead base box has been downloaded over 14 million times. 511,773 of those downloads have been since 9/29/2019. Support could be from several individuals or from one or more companies.

If you or your company would like to support a Homestead environment running on Apple Silicon I have created a list of things I would need to raise sponsorship funds for:

• Mac Mini M1, 16GB RAM, 1TB Storage: $1,299.00
• Applecare: $99
• TN State Sales Tax Est: $136.31
• US Income Tax (35%): $537.01*

Total: $2,071.32 (*or $1,534.31 if a company purchases the machine instead of me raising money)

The current delivery options as of June 2021 are within 5-7 days for delivery.

In exchange, I will build a compatible Homestead base box and Repo project which will be MIT licensed open source hosted on Github. I will maintain and support the project for a minimum of 1 calendar year from the date of first stable release.

Risk Assessment: There is a possibility of specific providers simply not supporting Apple Silicon. As long as Vagrant (active development happening for support), and some providers are available I will be able to successfully build a version.

Parallels is in active development for their products. June 2021 Parallels shipped their updates to support Apple Silicon M1 cpus. VMware is also in development to support the M1.

So excited for todays announcements from @Apple!

While we're not quite ready to announce our timeline, we're happy to say that we are committed to delivering VMware virtual machines on #AppleSilicon! pic.twitter.com/en1FNorxrM

— VMware Fusion (@VMwareFusion) November 10, 2020

If you or your company would like to sponsor this work or discuss options please contact me via email. My address is my first name at my first name last name dot me. Please use "Homestead Sponsor" or similar subject line.