Adobe Photoshop, the most popular photo editor in the world, has been updated this week with support for Apple Silicon Macs. Mark Dahm, Photoshop Product Manager, in an interview with ComputerWorld how the company worked to update its programs for the M1 Macs and what are the real benefits of this transition.
We already know that an updated app with full support for the M1 drive enables much better performance, not to mention more power efficiency – which is ideal for MacBook users. However, according to Dahm, Photoshop runs up to 50% faster on an M1 MacBook 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 a sophisticated software such as Photoshop to a new platform is not exactly easy, but the improvements for users are extremely important.
To set up a large application for Apple silicone, you need to invest on behalf of the developers. However, as we showed in Photoshop’s case, it can result in significant performance improvements. […] We compared an M1 MacBook with a previous MacBook-like configuration, and found that Photoshop runs 50% faster under native mode than older hardware.
The Photoshop product manager reminded that the app has been available for Mac users for over 30 years now, and that Adobe was still undergoing a major transition when Apple transferred from Power PC to Intel processors. Since Photoshop is one of the most used tools by professionals, it’s important that Adobe keeps the app up to date with the latest and greatest features.
At the same time, the more complex the software becomes, the more engineers have to rewrite it for a new platform. Dahm says the Rosetta 2 technology really helped the Photoshop team with the schedule until the update with M1 support was ready. He also praised Apple’s development tools, saying it offers a ‘seamless transition’ from Intel applications to Apple Silicon.
Fortunately, Apple’s Rosetta mode allowed Photoshop to run reliably and quickly on M1 devices on day one, without requiring significant changes to the code base. And many features ran just as fast or even faster than on previous systems, so the earlier questions about performance were satisfactorily resolved.
Currently only Photoshop and Lightroom have original versions that can work on M1 Macs. The company is also working on updates for Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush and Audition with Apple Silicon support, which are currently available as beta applications for Creative Cloud subscribers.
You can watch the full interview with Mark Dahm on the ComputerWorld website.
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