11 great apps ready for your new 2020 M1 Mac

This year marked the launch of the first Macs to be powered by Apple’s own silicon instead of Intel chips. As evidenced by our reviews of the M1 MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini, these machines are incredibly powerful and offer incredibly fast performance. This is especially true for applications that are designed to work natively on them and take full advantage of Apple’s latest technologies.

So in that sense, this year’s list of Mac apps will focus on some of the software that has already been optimized for this new era of Apple hardware. Last year’s choices remain just as relevant and useful today if you’re on an Intel machine. But if you’ve been gifted (or are giving yourself) to one of these fast new Macs, these are some great ways to prove what they can do.

We’ve put together our favorite and most used games, apps and entertainment. Check out our app choices for iPhones, Android Phones, Windows PCs, and Macs equipped with M1; our favorite mobile games from Apple Arcade and Google Play Pass; and our best choices for Gaming PCs, a PS5, Xbox One and X / S Series, Nintendo Switch, and VR. We also list our favorite streaming programs on the Disney Plus, Hulu, ESPN Plus, and Netflix; some great science fiction books; and exciting new podcasts. (Note: the price was correct at the time of publication, but may change.)

Pixelmator Pro

Pixelmator Pro is one of the best image editing applications for Mac. It has the usual set of RAW editing tools, presets, sophisticated layer editing and photo filters, and makes it easy to control every detail of your images. What sets Pixelmator Pro apart are the automatic adjustments it can make using a machine learning algorithm that has been trained with more than 20 million photos. The latest update also allows for greater customization of the interface, allowing you to place everything where it’s most suitable for your workflow. And in a world where many creative apps require a subscription, I really appreciate the one-time price of $ 19.99 for everything this app offers.

The Pixelmator Pro iPad app ($ 4.99) is also wonderful – especially if you like to touch up things with your Apple Pencil, which is how I edit many of my review photos.

Lightroom

Lightroom is the first of Adobe’s hugely popular applications to be optimized for Apple’s M1 silicon. And for many people, it’s the default choice for editing and organizing your photo collection. Now, the app has been updated to harness the power of Apple’s M1 chip to make editing even faster.

Remember that this is the normal version of Lightroom; Lightroom Classic does not run natively on the M1, but Adobe says there are no known issues with running it on the Rosetta 2 translation. In my experience, Lightroom Classic is very similar to its performance on Intel Macs.

A native M1 version of Photoshop is scheduled to come next year, but Adobe has not given release dates for other applications like Premiere Pro.

Google Chrome and Firefox

Two major browsers, Chrome and Firefox, have already been updated to run natively on M1 Macs, so you shouldn’t encounter any problems or irregular performance drops when using either. In the case of Chrome, just make sure to select “Mac with Apple chip” when downloading – otherwise, you will end up installing the Intel version, which will still work, but not as efficiently.

Microsoft Edge currently has support for M1 on its beta channel, so that too shouldn’t be too far off.

Fantastic

If Apple’s integrated Calendar app isn’t helping you, then Fantastical may be the most advanced alternative you’re looking for. Your natural language analyzer can turn normal phrases about your plans into a perfectly formatted appointment entry. You can set the calendar view exactly the way you want it, and Fantastical also has widgets that you can insert into your Mac’s “Today” sidebar. There’s a basic free version; the Premium version, which starts at $ 4.99 a month, offers additional features, such as the ability to add tasks, full-screen views and calendar synchronization.

Microsoft 365

Microsoft quickly updated its entire Mac suite to fully optimize Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook and OneNote for M1. Therefore, you should notice very fast performance when working with any of them. I’m sure many people will prefer these productivity apps from Apple, such as Pages and Numbers.

Twitter

Listen to me: the Twitter app for macOS was really great. It took a little bit of polishing and bug fixing to get to this point, but Twitter for Mac is now complete, responsive and not as prone to crashes as before. If you haven’t given the native Twitter app a try yet, now is a great time.

If you still prefer a third-party app, Tweetbot remains the destination, and is also universal and M1 ready.

iMazing

IMazing is a great device manager for exploring everything that resides on your iPhone or iPad. You can create backups (different from Apple’s regular ones) and get your messages, photos, music and more directly from the device.

But it was also discovered shortly after the launch of M1 Macs that this software can be used to “side load” and install iPhone applications – even those that have not yet chosen – on macOS. If you are experiencing this, just hope that not everything works perfectly.

IMazing also recently added the option to clearly see which applications on its system are universal or developed for Intel.

Bartender

If you have a cluttered menu bar at the top of your Mac’s screen, Bartender can help you organize things. One of our favorite macOS utilities for a long time, this app allows you to hide everything under an icon in the menu bar to ease chaos. You can also set triggers so that certain icons are displayed only when it makes the most sense.

Neural Mix Pro

Neural Mix Pro is an application that allows you to separate the various parts of a song – vocals, instrumentation and beats – and listen to them individually. You can also change the tempo of a song without affecting the pitch. A useful tool for DJs and musicians, it also attracts my inner musical nerd. The end result can still sometimes sound a bit y-phase (like most speech removal software) and have some artifacts, but it does a better job than other apps I’ve tried for that purpose. Just know that it is expensive compared to other recommendations here; you will have to pay $ 50 to unlock the app.

BetterTouchTool

If you have Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chip, well, that means you also have the Adore-or-Hate Touch Bar above the keyboard. There are ways to customize it according to your preferences in macOS settings, but BetterTouchTool is a utility that offers even greater flexibility on what goes where to use the Touch Bar, allowing you to quickly tap useful shortcuts for your most important applications.