Apologies, I am just getting started in development of audio plugins so a long journey ahead.
I am in need of a new Mac as I have an old machine that is on its last legs and have been looking at the apple silicon offerings.
My question is, I understand that you can develop JUCE plugins to run on Apple Silicon alongside Intel, but, can you use an Apple silicon machine to develop JUCE plugins and are there any restrictions?? (e.g. can I use an M2 mac to develop JUCE plugins to run on Intel? etc etc)
Yes you can.
A brand new Apple Silicon machine somewhat limits the macOS Intel Versions you can target as it forces you to use a very new version of Xcode which might not be able to target macOS versions from many years ago.
Yes, you can compile for both Intel and Arm on an Arm Mac.
Not any meaningful ones, if you’re just getting started. It may be more difficult to target particularly old, unsupported versions of macOS (10.13 and earlier) on an Arm Mac, but that probably doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out.
If you want to also target Windows, then one possible limitation to keep in mind is that you can’t run an Intel Windows in a virtual machine on an Apple Silicon Mac. So to build and test on Windows you’d need at least a second Intel machine of some kind (which could probably be your old Mac as well).
For what it is worth, I build for Windows using Parallels and Windows 11 ARM on my M1 MacBook Pro. I build x64 targets, and debug those directly on the M1 hardware thanks to the Windows x64/ARM64 translation technology.
