uTorrent Releases Long-Awaited Mac Version
Written by Ernesto on November 27, 2008Until today, uTorrent – the client of choice for most BitTorrent users – was only available on Windows PCs. Now, after years of waiting, Mac users finally have the chance to try uTorrent, to see for themselves how it fares against the competition.
uTorrent for Windows saw its first public release in September 2005, and soon became the most widely used BitTorrent application.
In 2006, uTorrent was acquired by BitTorrent Inc., who continued to develop the application, and promised a Mac version.
The uTorrent for Mac projects started roughly two years ago. Initially it was based on libtorrent, but last year the development team decided to make the client a port of its Windows counterpart. A few months ago, an early Alpha release of the Mac version had leaked to the public, the official release, however, has some significant improvements and is much more mature.
The Mac release only runs on Leopard/Intel Macs at the moment, and is still in Beta. Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak that they are working on getting the bugs in PowerPC fixed as well as back-porting to Tiger. “We’re obviously really psyched that we finally got this beta out there. This is indeed a port of the Utorrent source on top of OSX,” Simon said.
“On Windows, uTorrent is by far the best Bittorrent client out there on a power:performance basis. Following on from uTorrent’s roots, we have continued to focus on only features that users really want, and we have avoided bloating up on lots of clutter. We’re now looking forward to bringing that specialness to the world of Mac-lovers,” Simon added.
uTorrent for Mac can be downloaded over here. Since it is still in Beta, the uTorrent team encourages early adopters to post bugs and annoyances in the uTorrent forums.
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57 Responses
Its out finally, a lot of people will be saying goodbye to Azureus & Transmission
Wonder when they will release source code…
If they had released it as free software, a MACOSX port would have been made a lot earlier im sure!
Good news for torrenting Mac users.
Who needs uTorrent when Deluge has been available to every OS under the sun for ages.
This is great news. Although I do not have a mac, but I’m planning on buying one in the near future.
Your over here link doesn’t work fyi :)
Ernesto: fixed!
Great news!
“was only available on Windows PCs” uTorrent runs perfectly in Linux with Wine. Deluge and Transmission are also great choices, the more good options the better :)
Wow, I didnt think that would happen in a million years. Maybe Mac is getting more of the market share than I thought.
Jess
Love my utorrent, now you Apple loving people can see what its all about ;P
As someone who loved uTorrent on Windows, I’m sticking with Transmission on mac. Transmission has auto updating IP blocks, something you (I believe) still have to do externally in uTorrent, and also they’re doing an intel only port because it’s a WINE like crossover copy. It won’t run as fast as native code, so why bother?
This is great news for Mac lovers. Hell I might even buy a Mac myself now :) NOT!!!
w00t sweet as. thanks uTorrent!
“and also they’re doing an intel only port because it’s a WINE like crossover copy. It won’t run as fast as native code, so why bother?”
Good point
And if you actually bothered to test it, you’d realize that it isn’t a winelib port.
I always liked Transmission, atleast there is another alt.
Well, I have a Mac and I use Vuze 4.1 which is actually pretty good overall. One problem with Vuze (Azureus) though remains: Not all people you upload to or download from are on the same side of the Swarm as you are. So there may be peers in “hiding” that we can’t work with in sharing our files.
My Mac is a Tiger 10.4 (Power PC) so this new version of uTorrent probably won’t work on my system.
I’ve tried the Mac version and prefer the Windows.
I have Windows running on my Mac with Parallels exclusively to run uTorrent and I don’t see myself making the switch. It’s good that they got one out for Mac users though, it’s about time!
I would never install Windows on my Mac.
That’s because I’m virus-free…….and loving it!
Sticking with transmission, it is like using internet explorer on OsX, yes it is available… so what ???
And spare me lessons about greatness of uTorrent. Yes it is great, so are other clients. It is not like you are going to have kids with it, it is just a tool to get content, so stop idolizing it.
If they’re working to make it run on PowerPC architecture, it can run on PS3… Kind of…
Now make a Linux port and I’ll be happy.
@26
Use the RasterBar Libtorrent and rtorrent and use the front end BTG.
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I’ll stick with Transmission, until uTorrent includes RSS syndication, seeming as Transmission isn’t looking like it will ever include it as a feature.
I love it when people who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about start spouting off.
Anyone who downloaded it can see its 100% native with a Cocoa interface especially for the mac, on top of the uTorrent protocol implementation. No wine or crossover or any of that crap.
Wine/Crossover requires Intel because all end users have are binaries. BitTorrent obviously has source code to uTorrent and can recompile for ppc. If it doesn’t work on ppc it’s because there are source code dependencies to Intel that are tricky to remove. That’s hardly surprising when you consider what kind of crazy hacks must be in uTorrent to make it so compact and efficient.
The functionality of the beta is very basic and is no different than the previously leaked alpha. Nothing has been added at all, in terms of user interface. Maybe a few bugs solved. Until it gets more feature-rich, it’s no replacement for Azureus/Vuze
y would anyone choose to run utorrent on a mac when transmission is far more efficient and much neater than utorrent in the first place..
oh and its open source as well ;)
I use Deluge on Linux and it’s great. if utorrent comes to Linux I won’t use it since it’s closed software and it phones home, this I know because of my firewall(when I was using Windows)
agree with #35…. Are mac users this stupid? :P.. ok i know not all of macs users are stupid but if you use utorrent, anything but the final version, i really think you are stupid…
does this mean this can be ported to linux now? considering mac OS is essentially based on a linux distro?
But what’s the point of porting it to Linux when you can just run it under Wine?
Mmm hmmm…. What is “torrent?”
utorrent doesn’t have any feature that transmission doesn’t so i’m gonna stick to transmission!
Mac OS X is based on a Linux distro? Who f*u*cking stupid are you exactly? Are you just trolling?
Just tried it along side Transmission. Not that impressed. Hopefully they find a way to speed it up because I’m getting much better performance out of Transmission.
YAAYY woohoo i dont use a mac.. lol
Macs still fail because I can not game on them. And over my dead body am I paying more than 50% of a gaming pc for a mac. And even if I did it would probably be one of the broken ones that apple doesnt belive exist. Yep they dont support the broken ones. And there just so limited. Like with a linux pc I can do so much. With a windows pc I can do more e.g. play games then run linux in a vm :D. And I dislike all apple products so pass lol.
There is absolutely no reason why anyone should buy a mac unless they want to pay a premuim price for a non functional pile of garbage that may or may not work at all. And as their quick time is spyware and they use DRM as well as installing kill switches in their hardware I can not trust a mac. What if it stole my private documents or something or uploaded them with drm and made me repurchase them in a format that only runs on a anew IPhone then I will need to buy a IPhone on a 100year fixed plan instead of a new car :(
Looking at the comments.. I can’t help but wonder under WHAT criteria people are judging Deluge as a lightweight client.
See, I actually monitor my RAM/CPU usage – and Deluge uses *more* than Azureus on Ubuntu!
Tried it last night, so far so good.
Wonder if they actually pull any revenue for that useless search box that links to their google search referal page.
Does anybody know the peer id for this new version?
I posted in utorrent’s own irc a bunch but they’ve been no help at all. Worst help channel ever.
Nice! Now Mac owners can receive the same condescending “Your hardware doesn’t measure up” replies to their support questions as Windows owners. Seriously, read the forums and look at all the people having problem with uTorrent overloading their router or their NIC and all you see is messages from the author telling them that they have crap hardware.
Peer Id UM0090 ?
tested it… it’s good but not for me, maybe people using Vuze may make the switch…
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strange how nobody points out that utorrent could have some “spying” code secretly put there by BitTorrent.com on behalf of RIAA.. don’t think i’m gonna use it..
For all seedboxes users a native linux version could be the next step now :)
I completely disagree with # 51 above.
First of all, QuickTime isn’t spyware. It’s slow but not impossible to use. Personally I don’t like QT because it’s not as multi-functional as the Mac version of VLC Player — which supports most types of movie and video formats. VLC only stalls with WMV files, but then it’s foolish to encode anything with WMV (which works best on PC of course).
What’s more the Mac hasn’t had a virus in 24+ years. That alone makes it worth the higher cost of a PC! My Mac Mini is still going strong as ever after more than 3 years.
The other thing (s)he said is that (s)he bought his / her Mac for gaming. Well…..Mac wasn’t designed to be a gaming machine. If you want games buy an X-Box 360.
Thank you. Good night and drive safely!
Sorry for posting anonymously. I am the “Spirit” of # 76. ;)
Not as good as Transmission or Vuze.
I need utorrent. Deluge is blocked by one of the trackers I use… so I have to use Utorrent…
and I actually have to use Wine… but it actually runs well, even on my old machine.
so I’m happy :)
ok now all you macfags have no excuse… get utorrent
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Linux FTW ;) Mac, while obviously far better technically than Windows, is even more closed, locked-in, etc… Linux is the seat of the free software movement…
Anyways, it’s always good to see apps going mult-platform. Though I really wish BitTorrent, Inc. would open source uTorrent already… faster development, Linux/BSD port, etc.
One thing that should be mentioned is that even if uTorrent uses a WINE-like approach (open source versions of Windows DLL libraries are used), there shouldn’t be any slowdown. Except for odd bugs, Wine isn’t slower than native Windows. Sometimes faster. It’s NOT EMULATING – it’s a bunch of replacement libraries that are open source.
Indeed, “even if,” but it doesn’t. People need to get this straight (not directing this at you, WOLViSH), this isn’t a winelib port. The core was ported for POSIX compatibility, so it’s completely native.
http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=339130#p339130
your stupid. stupid dummy. you stupid dummy head.
it does not work with Mac OS X Tiger
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