One of the advantages of Apple Silicon is we are starting to see applications that take advantage of the new hardware. Raymol is a free Metal-based build of PyMOL for Mac, iPad, and iPhone — a modern, native interface with real-time rendering, based on the open-source PyMOL engine first created by Warren DeLano.
A Metal rendering engine replaces OpenGL, adding real-time shadow mapping, ambient occlusion, and order-independent transparency at interactive frame rates. On supported Apple Silicon, hardware ray tracing is available for higher-quality lighting. The direct-download and Homebrew builds also include the built-in MCP server, so Claude can drive Raymol. The Mac App Store build leaves that out because App Store sandboxing doesn’t permit it — the engine, rendering, and every other feature are identical.