14 DAY TRIAL // Apple launched the very first M1-powered Macs earlier this week, and as the world’s number one software company, Microsoft wants to be among the first to support the new Apple Silicon.
And today, the Redmond-based software giant announced a testing build of Microsoft Office that’s optimized for the new M1 chips, which is pretty much the first step towards full support for the productivity suite on Apple’s new generation of devices.
Microsoft’s principal software engineer for Apple products, Erik Schwiebert, explained on Twitter that the company doesn’t yet have a specific launch date in mind for the production version of Office for M1-powered Macs.
Testing build already live, no ETA for the production channel
However, there’s no doubt Microsoft wants to make the whole thing happen as fast as possible, especially as the MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the Mac mini, all running on Apple Silicon, are projected to hit the shelves on November 17, as per Apple’s announcement earlier this week.
“MSFT plans to push a Universal build of Mac Office 2019 to the Beta Channel (formerly “Insider Fast”) by the end of today. We don’t have a public date or version for a final release; this is an initial peek for customers to test on hardware they may be acquiring this week,” Schwiebert said.
Needless to say, it won’t take long before Office goes live for Apple Silicon, only that Microsoft still needs to wait a little bit more to prepare the productivity suite for this chip. The company must receive more feedback from the first customers who purchase M1-powered devices and only then give the go-ahead for this update for everybody else.
Apple is also projected to release macOS Big Sur later today, and Microsoft Office already fully supports this new operating system.