This week, Adobe updated Photoshop with official support for Apple silicon, offering customers native support on Apple’s latest M1-powered Mac computers. In an interview with Computerworld, Photoshop Product Manager Mark Dahm promoted official Apple silicon support, saying that Photoshop runs 50% faster on an M1 MacBook compared to last year’s Intel-based MacBook.
Speaking to the team’s challenges during the transition to Apple silicon, Dahm said that performance was of utmost priority. Adobe wanted to ensure that it matched Photoshop’s performance on older architectures for customers running Apple silicon.
Photoshop has been fortunate enough to have been serving Mac customers for over 30 years and having lived through the transition from Power PC to Intel chips in the 2005/2006 timeframe, a few familiar considerations came to mind as the Apple silicon announcement was made.
For one, performance is top-of-mind for our creative professional customers, so we wondered how long it might take for us to match the years of performance-tuning that ensured smooth operation for Photoshop’s sophisticated blending and rendering capabilities.
Apple is encouraging all developers to build and recompile their apps with official support for Apple silicon. Until apps get updated, they run on Apple silicon using Apple’s Rosetta 2 technology, which enables apps built for Intel processors to run on the newer architecture. Dahm said that Photoshop ran sufficiently with Rosetta, in some cases even faster than it did natively on Intel Mac computers.
Read more at MacRumors.com