Hi, folks!
I've been using winbox app on MacOS for a long time. It's not a rock solid solution, sometimes it fails with some minor errors, but it's all we've got for now(until a native app is ready:). The main reason for most of those fails is a complex application environment which winbox is run on. Everybody knows that macos winbox is run on wine's environment run on top of macos system. So, we've got all drawbacks of macos' hardware management tricks(I mean USB LAN/WiFi adapter's limitations), then all the Wine's limitations and drawbacks and, lastly, all the winbox bugs, errors, limitations and drawbacks(perfect app, but every written app has its bugs, folks:). Apple Silicon architechture design gives us one more pain in a butt. There're numerous posts on the Internet about Winbox on MacOS(I found 61 post here) that can be divided in two categories: newbie's questions about installing wine and running it and version specific questions from persons who has already installed it and got troubles running it.
So, I thought it would be nice to have a place where everyone could post tips&tricks and get an idea why something isn't working as expected.
To start with, there's a special winbox documentation page on Mikrotik official documentation(2.5 Run WinBox on macOS). It's good enough to have things done. There's even a video of full installation process. That's completely enough to have winbox up and running after few small steps.
I think it's a bad idea to post links to custom builds/solutions from unidentified developers(anyway, they exists, but I don't recommend to use them).
I've got one issue with winbox on wine. Neighbor discovery works unreliable or doesn't work at all. I tried different setups with couple of routers(hEXs, mAP2nd and AX3).
First of all, neighbor discovery works pretty good on built-in Mac's wifi adapter. I can even connect two routers together and get neighbor discovery of hEX from wifi. But as soon as I try to connect from LAN dongle directly to hEX I get nothing or some strange errors like "ERROR: wrong username of password". I used a couple of external LAN adapters with same result. At this point I have to mention that MacOS' firewall is turned off, winbox and wine app are given excessive permissions, router's neighbor discovery is on, router is reset to blank configuration with no IP set up, winbox version is 3.40 x64 and yes, everything is fine with same version on windows. So, my clue is that the cause is MacOS has my LAN dongles set up in a restricted mode and there's a way(some sort of a MacOS terminal command) to set it up properly in order to winbox function properly. Maybe, someone knows something about it?