With Apple now having devices running off its own M1 silicon, Adobe has announced the addition of native support for Illustrator and InDesign on said devices.
According to an Adobe blog post, this means that Illustrator will get a 65% boost in performance on M1 Macs over Intel PCs, while InDesign will get a 59% performance boost.
For file-loading, Adobe, citing the results of a Pfeiffer report it commissioned, says that Illustrator users can expect to open and create documents “4x faster than on previous builds” on the M1-equipped MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. For InDesign, opening a file that’s heavy on graphics is said to be 185% faster, while scrolling performance on a text-heavy project will be 78% better.
Other specific examples provided in the post include scrolling while editing complex vectors (390% faster) and opening a “new file with 31 complex artboards” (119% faster).
The Pfeiffer report, which also benchmarked Photoshop, XD, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, and Lightroom Classic, said that Illustrator has 65% better performance on average with the M1 while Indesign had a 59% performance increase (the lowest of the bunch) on average. Photoshop saw the best gains at 89%.
While the report unsurprisingly paints a favourable picture of the M1’s performance, it also said, “For features that rely heavily on GPU acceleration, however, an Intel Mac with a discreet, powerful GPU can still outperform the current generation of M1 Macs in some areas.”
However, it then added, “There is little doubt, however, that Apple will address this in the future as new generations of M1 Macs close any remaining gaps with new Apple Silicon-based Macs.”
Adobe has begun rolling out native M1 support for Illustrator and InDesign and says that it’ll be available around the globe soon. The company is also working on optimizing the rest of its Creative Cloud apps, with Premiere Pro (which has had an M1 beta test going on since December 2020) to get native support “soon”. #adobe #mac #applem1
