Adobe CC running on Intel or Apple Silicon

[Aldro School]

I have a personal 2019 Mac desktop with an Intel 3.6 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9, AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB and 32GB RAM and a work Apple M1Max MacBook Pro with 32GB Ram (and 2TB SSD). In short, the i9 is so much better as a 4K/60 editing workstation with Premiere and After Effects, plus heavy Lightroom Classic use. I am very disappointed with the Apple Silicon machine and am really pleased it was not purchased with my own money.

Lightroom Classic is slow, I have to wait for each 6K JPEG to appear, whereas on the Intel Mac everything is instant. I am running CC 2023 apps, all up to date but everything on the M1 is laggy and just sloppy to use. 

Not sure why, perhaps if I were an Apple Final Cut and Motion user I'd have a different tale to tell, but I cannot stress how reliable, how stable and how much faster the Intel Mac is. 

IMHO, if you have a reliable Intel Mac, don't upgrade to Apple Silicon yet!

Has anyone else had similar experience?

[Manan Joshi]

Hi @Aldro School,

Thanks for sharing your experiences. As far as I can recall M1 chip performance with Adobe apps has been a mixed bag, some users like you do report lags. Looking at list of natively supported apps I see that Lightroom is natively supported on M1 chip

https://helpx.adobe.com/download-install/kb/apple-silicon-m1-chip.html

One thought that you could investigate is regarding the migration of apps, did you migrate your apps from the old computer to your new one? If so then uninstall them using Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool and then reinstall.

-Manan

[Aldro School]

Hi thanks for the reply.

Yes, fresh installation of everything from Creative Cloud. New machine, new
installations.

It just feels like the whole Adobe experience is much smoother on the Intel
machine.

I am sure over time the Apple Silicon versions will improve, but for now I
will carry out any major work on the Inter i9-9900K and less important or
work that needs a portable machine on the M1 Max.

It is all just very disappointing as so many people were gushing over the
M1 and the M1 Pro or M1 Max (especially tech YouTubers), but so far -
outside the Apple Pro Apps arena - it just seems underwhelming.

Thanks again

Phill

[rosss20513841]

What you will find is that the youtubers promoting certain products are doing so to get in certain company's good books to gain early access and freebies. Don't trust them. I have been using pc's and mac's for over 20 years for design work and don't see the hype surrounding M1 processors in my daily work. All the tests that are being publicised don't translate into real world work. My M1 struggles with scrolling through pages in Indesign so badly that the graphics appear to explode on screen. To ease the issue I have to close the document and sometimes the app. This happens with both CPU and GPU.

[Lumigraphics]

I've been a Mac user since the early PowerPC days and my experience is that Apple Silicon performs MUCH better than the older Intel models. I have a mix of Intel and M-series and there is no comparison.