Lightroom Classic on new M1 iPad Pro

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
April 29, 2021
5 replies
20342 views

I know it is not yet available but was wondering what the chances of running LC successfully on a new 16GB RAM M1 iPad Pro?

Thanks in advance.

This topic has been closed for replies.

thomasphoto

Participant

Make this happen, Adobe. Apple just announced Logic and Final Cut Pro (yes, I know not photo editors), but my point is, if they can do that, surely Adobe can bring LRc to the iPad Pro. You guys failed miserably to bring LR up to the specs that we enjoy with LRc as promised so many years ago, all we get is nothing more than a trickle if we are lucky. While I do have a Mac (desktop), I have zero interest in purchasing a MacBook, preferring the iPad Pros for my out-of-town assignments. The ball is in your court, Adobe, don't let us LRc users down.

J

Jamie D Coats

Participant

I know this post is old, but I'll add my two pennies worth, I considered buying a top of the range into iPad Pro, but it's simply not worth it. Apple are really missing so many sales because we don't see full-blown desktop applications. Running on it. My order, in Canadian dollars was over $4,000 but I've moved on because of this. I'm also now looking at Captain One.

L

Lukasz29314659ckap

Participant

Totally agree...I think it's a joke that you have such a powerful, advanced and portable machine like IPad Pro yet zero support for Pro apps. Got myself top of the line M2 and am amazed how fast is it and how well is it working yet at the same time completely dissapointed in lack of a proper app support...restricted Lightroom, Photoshop etc are useless...unfortunately will not keep it for long because of that very reason.

Ian Lyons

Community Expert

What is missing from the iPad version of Lightroom that makes you write that it 'lacks proper app support...'?

Conrad_C

Community Expert

The current version of Lightroom Classic isn’t even designed for M1 Macs, it’s an Intel version that is only able to run on an M1 Mac through Rosetta translation.

Some fundamental technical aspects of applications like Lightroom Classic are simply not supported on iOS regardless of processor, and Apple does not provide any way to install macOS on an iPad. That’s why the only version that runs on iPad is cloud Lightroom (not Classic) on iPad OS. If anything changes about that, it will depend on Apple expanding what iOS supports. The soonest we might hear about that is if Apple announces sufficiently radical changes to iPad OS (or much less likely, iPad support for running macOS) at Apple WWDC on June 7.

Many people hope that Apple giving the iPad an M1 and up to 16GB RAM indicates some kind of big shift coming in what Apple will let an iPad do, but we won’t know what that is until WWDC.

Davidstephenphoto

Participant

It is now. 😜

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Yes, and it is interesting to revisit this post months later. Lightroom Classic is now optimized for M1 Apple Silicon, but…in the many months since the M1 iPad Pro was released, Apple WWDC came and went, the release of iOS 15 came and went, and still, Apple has done nothing and announced nothing to make it possible to run Mac software on an M1 iPad Pro. All of the hopeful speculation for Mac software on M1 iPad Pro never came true. So we cannot expect, any time soon, to be able to run the Apple Silicon Mac version of Lightroom Classic on iPad OS without modification.

What’s left, is to wonder how likely it is that Adobe would completely rewrite Lightroom Classic for iPad OS. But that seems very unlikely for now, largely because of the ways that iPad OS does not support everything that macOS does. If Adobe tried to make Lightroom Classic for iPad OS today, under the limitations of iPad OS and the constraints of a touch UX, it would probably look and work at lot like the existing ground-up rewrite of Lightroom for iPad that they already did.