Slow Performance in InDesign with Large Documents on MacBook Pro M1 and Concerns About M5 Upgrade

Hi ​@k34097905j6ua,

I hope the suggestions shared by the expert helped and gave you some clarity on this. If you’ve had a chance to try those and are still facing performance issues in Adobe InDesign, please feel free to share your observations here.

We will be happy to assist further. 

Abhishek

You may be targeting the wrong bottleneck. Moving from an M1 with 64GB RAM to a newer Apple Silicon chip will improve responsiveness, but InDesign doesn’t scale linearly with CPU performance on heavy documents. A faster chip often ends up waiting on the same layout, redraw, and link-management limitations.

Since you already have 64GB, it’s unlikely you’re hitting a memory ceiling. Unless Activity Monitor shows consistent pressure, a hardware upgrade will probably give incremental gains rather than a dramatic improvement.

Before investing in a new machine, it’s worth isolating where the slowdown is coming from:

• Split the file into an .indb Book. Large single documents carry a lot of overhead.
• Even roundtripping files to IDML and back to InDesign files can reduce file size and clear out things in the file to help speed it up
• Reduce display loaduse Typical Display and avoid High Quality unless needed.
• Disable Live Preflight while working.
• Audit links a few oversized or unoptimised PSD/TIFF etc files can disproportionately impact performance.
• Check parent pages and overrides for unnecessary complexity.

A useful diagnostic is to split the document in half. If one half remains slow, split again this “divide and conquer” approach can often pinpoint a problematic section or asset.

If your current setup still struggles with a clean, optimised file, then a newer machine will feel smoother just not transformational.