Adobe Photoshop now runs natively on MacBooks with M1 chips

Dubai - Latest laptops' stature as go-to productivity machine further enhanced

US software giant Adobe on Thursday announced that its flagship Photoshop application now runs natively on Apple MacBooks with the new M1 processor, further enhancing the new laptops' stature as a go-to productivity machine.

Previously, only Adobe Lightroom was available on the M1 Macs; Photoshop is a significant addition, given the number of graphic artists and creators who rely on Macs to carry out their work.

"I am thrilled to announce that today we are releasing the first version of Photoshop to run natively on Macs with the new M1 chip. Our internal tests show that Photoshop delivers significant performance gains across the application for customers using these latest Macs," Pam Clark, vice-president for Photoshop product management and product strategy at Adobe, said in a blog post.

Apple's M1-powered MacBooks were released late last year to much anticipation, the culmination of the iPhone-makers march towards using its in-house chips that deliver significantly better performance. Major software makers have been working with Apple to optimise their apps and take advantage of the M1's architecture.

Adobe's internal tests show that a wide range of features running an average of 1.5 times the speed of similarly-configured previous generation systems, including opening and saving files, running filters, and compute-heavy operations like Content-Aware Fill and Select Subject, "which all feel noticeably faster".

Early benchmarking also shows that some operations are substantially faster with the new chip.

Clark added that the performance improvements are "just the beginning".

"We will continue to work together with Apple to further optimise performance over time. We think our customers using these new Macs will love the difference, too."

Additionally, Adobe also announced the release of two big features for Photoshop on the iPad: Cloud Documents Version History and the ability to work on Cloud Documents while offline.

As Cloud Documents are auto-saved, every document also has a version history. Now you can browse and revert back for up to 60 days of your history. Versions can be bookmarked so they don’t expire, renamed and saved permanently.

Users can now also select Cloud Documents they want to store locally and access while you offline.

— alvin@khaleejtimes.com