Adobe Photoshop, the world’s most popular photo editor, was updated this week with native support for Apple Silicon Macs. Mark Dahm, Photoshop’s product manager, detailed in an interview with Computer world how the company has been working to update its applications to M1 Macs and what are the real benefits of this transition.
We already know that having an updated application with full support for the M1 chip allows for much better performance, not to mention more energy efficiency – which is great for MacBook users. However, according to Dahm, Photoshop runs up to 50% faster on a MacBook M1 when compared to a previous generation Intel MacBook.
The difference becomes even more noticeable when you compare it to older Intel Macs. Adobe says that upgrading complex software like Photoshop to a new platform is not exactly easy, but the improvements for users are extremely significant.
Recompiling a great application for Apple’s silicon requires investment on behalf of its developers. However, as we have shown in the case of Photoshop, this can result in significant performance improvements for the user. […] We compared a MacBook M1 with a previous generation MacBook with a similar configuration and found that in native mode, Photoshop was running 50% faster than old hardware.
The product manager for Photoshop recalled that the application has been available to Mac users for more than 30 years and that Adobe has already made another major transition before, when Apple migrated from Power PC to Intel processors. As Photoshop is one of the tools most used by professionals, it is important for Adobe to keep the application up to date with the best and latest features.
At the same time, the more complex the software gets, the more engineers need to rewrite it for a new platform. Dahm says Rosetta 2 technology really helped the Photoshop team with the timeline until the update with M1 support was ready. He also praised Apple’s development tools, saying that they provide a “seamless transition” from Intel applications to the Apple Silicon.
Fortunately, Apple’s Rosetta mode allowed Photoshop to run reliably and quickly on M1 devices on the first day, without requiring significant changes to the code base. And many features were running as fast, or even faster than in previous systems, so those previous performance issues were being resolved quite satisfactorily.
At the moment, only Photoshop and Lightroom have native versions to run on M1 Macs. The company is also working on updates for Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush and Audition with support for Apple Silicon, which are currently available as beta apps for Creative Cloud subscribers.
You can read the full interview with Mark Dahm on Computer world on the Internet network.
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