InDesign experience choppy on Apple M1 MacBook Air 8gb RAM

[beepboop22]

Upon hearing the news on June 16th that Adobe has updated InDesign to run natively with the M1 chip, I ran to the store to get a MacBook Air with 8gb RAM. However, I seem to be having trouble with InDesign with the spinning wheel popping up every now and then and scrolling through my document is extremely laggy. I'm not sure if it's because more RAM is required. I am still within the 14 day return/exchange period with Apple and would appreciate some advice on this matter.

Thanks in advance!

[Bill Silbert]

Make sure that you are using InDesign version 16.3. If not then your InDesign would still be running through Rosetta 2 emulation which would explain the lags. Also if you are using any third-party plug-ins then they would also need to be updated to work natively with the M1. Otherwise they would need to run on Rosetta 2 which could also be responsible for the lag. 

[beepboop22]

I realized this after my post that it was not yet 16.3. I then downloaded the pre-release version that is indeed 16.3 which gave me a similar experience (laggy and sometimes not responding), though Activity Monitor tells me far less RAM is utilized by the app.

[Ashutosh_Mishra · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

Sorry to hear about your experience. Do you see this behavior while working on a specific file or performing a specific task? You may try the suggestions given on this community post(https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/resolve-slow-performance-and-unexpected-behavior-of-indesign...) to improve the performance of the app. Hope it helps.

Regards,

Ashutosh

[image-shift]

i had the same issue. indesign latest version (16.4) mac big sur (11.6) macbook pro M1... indesignw as lagging and the colour wheel was spinning very very very often - super annoying >> my solution: i switched off TIME MACHINE. ever since i had no iusses! hope it helps some of you.