Apple Silicon M1 Chip not Connecting

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I don’t have an Apple Silicon Mac to test it. But macOS comes with Apple drivers for the SiLabs chips out of the box. You can check it with:

ls -l /System/Library/DriverExtensions/com.apple.DriverKit-AppleUSBSLCOM.dext

If the command shows a few files, you have the Apple drivers.

Then again, Silicon Labs have updated their drivers to use the new user-mode DriverKit extensions instead of the old kernel extensions. If not, you probably wouldn’t have been able to install them on a Apple Silicon Mac anyway.

You can try to uninstall the drivers. For the latest drivers, it’s very simple. Just move CP210xVCPDriver from the Applications folder to the trash.

Whether the Apple or the SiLabs drivers are used can be derived from the device name:

  • /dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART: SiLabs drivers
  • /dev/cu.usbserial-0001: Apple drivers

I can’t promise you the Apple drivers will make a difference though.

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