New Imac Specs Enough for PS and AI?

Conrad C is co-author of the brilliant Photoshop Classroom in a Book 2021:

https://www.adobepress.com/store/adobe-photoshop-classroom-in-a-book-2021-release-9780136904731

Over the last half year it has become evident from user reports that you can get more done with less memory on an M1 Mac than was typically expected on an Intel-based computer; in other words, jobs that would have been painful on an 8GB RAM Intel Mac tend to run surprisingly smoothly on an 8GB RAM M1 Mac. Based on those reports, it is likely that an Apple Silicon Mac with 16GB of Unified Memory may give you performance comparable to an Intel Mac with 32GB RAM.

The problem with a hard requirement of 32GB RAM is…there is no M1 Mac sold today that will let you specify that much. All current M1 Macs are limited to 16GB of Unified Memory. Which is why the previous paragraph is reassuring: You might not need 32GB RAM on an M1 Mac.

If you go to the Apple Store today and spec 32GB RAM for an iMac, you chose an Intel iMac. The only M1 iMac available right now is the bottom 24" model; the larger sizes are still Intel-based. But that “low-end” M1 iMac is actually faster in some ways (but not all) than the bigger, more expensive Intel iMacs.

For Photoshop and other Adobe applications, if you are buying an M1 Mac you should get 16GB of Unified Memory. While 8GB is technically enough, 16GB would allow better performance with large files, and less stress on the internal SSD (less swapping due to virtual memory or Photoshop scratch files). You should also either specify enough internal storage to handle large Photoshop scratch files, or if that is too expensive, plan to attach fast external storage that can be used only for Photoshop scratch files.

I would like to get 32GB RAM for my next Mac (for specific reasons), and I do want that to be an Apple Silicon Mac. That’s why I don’t have one yet — The M1 processor is intended only for the bottom of the Mac line, so I am waiting for the next generation of Apple Silicon Macs that will fill out the midrange and high end of the Mac line, and are expected to finally have the higher RAM limit, more powerful graphics hardware, and better port selection that the higher end Mac models need.

32 should be considered minimum.

Photoshop will work with 8 as long as you have an efficient scratch disk setup. As far as Photoshop alone is concerned, the scratch disk is much more important than RAM. There is never "enough" RAM anyway - think of RAM as a fast access cache to the scratch disk's main memory.

But you'll probably be running other applications along with Photoshop, and that's when 8 GB will be eaten up very quickly.

Bottom line - to run Photoshop efficiently, you should have 32 GB RAM, and at least 500 GB free space for the scratch disk.