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Kudos0

When will Norton 360 run natively on Mac M1?

Posted: 26-Dec-2021 | 6:23AM · 1 Reply ·

Hello,

Norton 360 seems to use a disproportionate amount of processing power on my MacBook Pro with an M1. Now I noticed it is still running on Rosetta 2. When can I expect to see a native version? Without that, Norton 360 does not seem like a good solution for my MacBook Pro anymore. Kind of disappointing that there is no native version yet. It seems all other apps I use are native now.

Kind regards,

Tibor

Labels: Norton Security for Mac

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Kudos0

Re: When will Norton 360 run natively on Mac M1?

Posted: 08-Jan-2022 | 11:54AM · Permalink

Don't immediately assume that Norton performance problems are a result of Rosetta 2. Rosetta 2 is an ahead-of-time translator instead of a dynamic (instruction at a time) translator. It doesn't emulate Intel instructions one by one. Instead, at first launch (or even installation), Intel macOS applications get translated into ARM code once, so what runs is actually native ARM code. I've heard that translated code runs pretty well on M1 Macs, not a dramatic performance penalty for the vast majority of applications according to benchmarks I've seen.

There are plenty of instances of Norton consuming a disproportionate amount of CPU time on Macs (both M1 and Intel). I've personally seen runaway Norton processes on Macs which have no apparent explanation. Some times a complete uninstall and reinstall of the latest version fixes this (especially if you've done upgrade installs of Norton). Sometimes updating definitions via Live Update helps. Sometimes a reboot helps.

And sometimes not...

There are some mitigation strategies to reduce the impact (turn off scanning within archives, for example). And you can't forget the overhead of the firewall.

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