As some of you are aware, Pony currently doesn't have any support for running on Apple Silicon. We have no current CI resources via GitHub or CirrusCI that allow us to provide prebuilt packages for the new ARM based macs. Worse still, the build system currently errors out in places when trying to build from source.

A couple of intrepid Pony users tried to step into the breach to fix the build issues, but they were just starting using Pony and trying to figure out the oddities of arm processor support for `-mnative`, figuring out other issues, and learning cmake is a bit much to try out when you just want to dip your toes into trying a programming language.

We recognize Apple Silicon support is important and will be even more so in the future as Apple drops support for x86 based processors. 

Yesterday, two members of the Pony community ordered Mac Minis. With those machines in hand, Joe and Borja will be able to spend what might be a non-trivial amount of time getting us up and running on Apple Silicon and then will have the hardware to be our M1 support team going forward if any macOS or Apple Silicon issues arise.

To pay for the machines, we are spending money from the collective. Money for the collective comes from donations from members of the community and those who are otherwise interested in putting money towards helping Pony succeed. We don't bring in a ton of money, but over the course of time, it has built up to about $8,000. We've been careful to keep our expense low so that we would have money to use when "we really needed it". 

Recently, the core team got together and decided that putting about $1500 towards Apple Silicon was something that "really needed to happen. We'd like to thank each person who has or is still donating money to help support Pony. We couldn't have done this without you. Thank you very much!

If you are interested in seeing your donations are spent, everything is open and in the clear, you can view all approved expenses on the open collective website.

Thanks again to you, our donors, and thanks to Joe and Borja for stepping up to be "the M1 support team". We'll see you "on the M1 side" of things in a while.