Adobe expands Creative Cloud M1 support, claims over 80% better performance than Intel

It’s barely been six months since the first M1 macs went on sale, and Adobe already has all native Apple Silicon support for all of the core apps in the Creative Cloud suite. The company on Tuesday announced the availability of native versions of Illustrator, InDesign, and Lightroom Classic. Premiere’s Apple Silicon version is still in public beta and will be available soon.

They join already-available native versions of Photoshop, XD, and Lightroom, making all of the seven core Creative Cloud apps now optimized to run natively on M1 macs.

Adobe also commissioned third-party performance benchmarks from The Pfeiffer Report. The benchmarks covered all seven of the core M1-native Creative Cloud apps and took 774 individual measurements on a range of workflows and activities. The two systems compared were configured as follows:

Apple M1: 13 inch M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM, 2TB SSD

Intel: 13 inch Intel Core i5 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM, 2TB SSD

As configured, the M1 system would cost $2,299 and the Intel system would cost $2,399.

While the performance varied based on application and workflow, the overall performance improvement across all apps and tests is a whopping 83 percent. The app with the lowest performance advantage over the Intel-based MacBook Pro is InDesign, which averaged “only” 59 percent faster. The biggest performance boost is in Lightroom Classic, which at a 116-percent boost is more than twice as fast on the M1 MacBook Pro.

This chart from the report summarizes the performance boost in Creative Cloud apps, and highlights a couple of tests in each app that were remarkably faster on the M1 MacBook Pro.

Apple’s transition to its own SoCs is definitely paying dividends for creative professionals, and we’re not even halfway through the two-year transition process.