Apple M1 Support - Taking Far Too Long!

[tom_gosling]

Apple released the developer transition kit on the 29th of June last year and yet InDesign is basically unusable on M1 macs. That's 8 months ago! So Adobe has had 8 months to develop M1 versions of the software and the M1 macs themselves have been out for 3 months - hardly "Bleeding Edge" as an Adobe representative has said in another thread about the same issue which is now locked leading me to write this! Do you honestly think that this is good enough for your customers!? The very least you could do is to give us an exact schedule of when you will have fully functional M1 versions and a warning on product pages saying that certain applications don't work on M1. Why should I pay my subscription for substandard software and support? I've used Adobe products for 20 years and I feel you're taking your users patience for granted. I'm now a sotware engineer myself and 8 months to update and recompile is unheard of especially for such a large company as Adobe. You must have a real contempt for your end users if you think you can blame them for using modern equipment which has been out for the best part of a year and you haven't bothered to release working updates.

[Steve Werner]

I agree with Eugene. Adobe IS working on support for the M1 Macs. But it's not a small effort for a product like InDesign which is much more complex than the low-end Affinity products. Once created, it needs to go through beta testing. I'd be surprised to see it finished earlier than MAX in 2021 this fall. 

And Rosetta 2, which is supposed to be a temporary solution before native supports is available probably was never tested on InDesign (Apple would test of on Office products, maybe Photoshop).

[jane-e]

---

@Steve Werner wrote:

I'd be surprised to see it finished earlier than MAX in 2021 this fall. 

Have you heard there will even be a MAX 2021 in the fall, Steve? Adobe has not announced a date. ☹️

https://www.adobe.com/max.html

~ Jane

[Steve Werner]

Nope, but in Prerelease meetings, they always refer to releases in relationship to MAX 2021 so I'm sure it's happening, no doubt still virtual. No dates mentioned.

[tom_gosling]

@Steve Werner Affinity products aren't low end, they've got very good reviews from the industry creative sources. They are just more focused and less bloated. You are wrongly equating price and popularity with quality. Also printing houses? Are you stuck in the 90s? Future of content is digital not printing.

[tom_gosling]

I think the problem is you're a bunch of designers so don't understand how software gets made and the industry around it. You keep on saying the same thing over about how I should have waited until Adobe sorts themselves out before buying a computer - I need to use a M1 mac to write software for other M1 macs! My business is software, I just use Adobe for some bits of art stuff and the occasional printed document because I was a designer for 10 years about 10 years ago and have stuck with Adobe just because it's what I know. Knowing what I know I can say that Adobe has an antiquated approach to writing software, these days we try and release updates for the latest and greatest within days or at most weeks after harware is capable of using it - taking 8 months is unheard of. But if you guys are all happy with using old machines with rickety software then maybe your standards are just a bit low to understand the problem.

[Eugene Tyson]

Again - the forums aren't going to get you much attention.

You really should have waited to buy an M1 Mac when the support was there for the software you wanted to run on it. Sorry to keep saying this to you - I'm sure (and by your responses) you're pretty annoyed by the whole thing. 

I've been on other forums too - for computer games and other software - and people lauded the M1 mac when it came out - it was the best thing since sliced bread, apparently. I was genuinely impressed with the M1 chip - the benchmarks I've seen have put it (for 13-inch laptops) up there with mid-high end Intel/AMD processors - something difficult to find in 13-inch laptops. 

But now the forums are full of people saying they are getting crashes upon crashes. 

One forum I am on said they probably won't release a version of their game with M1 chip support as there isn't enough userbase to justify the work that needs to go into it. 

Maybe Apple will work on Rosetta 3 and that will be better. 

That being said - the best place to get your voice heard is here 

https://helpx.adobe.com/ie/x-productkb/global/how-to-user-voice.html

[tom_gosling]

No high performance software should be run on any emulator no matter how good the emulator is. If you don't understand that then there's really no point getting in any more discussions about it. Abobe counts as software where performance is important and hence every single line of code should be written to target M1 macs specifically going forward. It's only Arm architecture anyway which everyone is really familiar with - it's been around since 1983!

[Eugene Tyson]

Locking this thread. You have been given the correct channel to vent your disappointment.

We obviously disagree and it is going nowhere.

[Ashutosh_Mishra · Accepted solution]

Hi all,

Sorry about the inconvenience caused. The first Beta release of InDesign for Apple silicon M1 is now available to download. Please try installing by following the instructions on this page and share your observations with us.

Regards,

Ashutosh