Adobe Officially Releases Photoshop For Apple M1, Says It's 50% Faster (thenextweb.com) 123
Adobe today officially unveiled Photoshop for Apple's M1 chip, claiming it provides a 50% performance boost compared to analogous Intel Macs. The Next Web reports: While Adobe has had a beta version of Photoshop for M1 available since November, this is the first time it's been available widely. Previously Apple users could run the Intel version through Apple's Rosetta technology, which didn't fully take advantage of the new chip's power.
[According to Adobe:] "Our internal tests show a wide range of features running an average of 1.5X the speed of similarly configured previous generation systems. Our tests covered a broad scope of activities, including opening and saving files, running filters, and compute-heavy operations like Content-Aware Fill and Select Subject, which all feel noticeably faster. Our early benchmarking also shows that some operations are substantially faster with the new chip." Be warned that there are a couple of recent features missing on the M1 version of the app, most notably inviting others to edit cloud documents and preset syncing.
[According to Adobe:] "Our internal tests show a wide range of features running an average of 1.5X the speed of similarly configured previous generation systems. Our tests covered a broad scope of activities, including opening and saving files, running filters, and compute-heavy operations like Content-Aware Fill and Select Subject, which all feel noticeably faster. Our early benchmarking also shows that some operations are substantially faster with the new chip." Be warned that there are a couple of recent features missing on the M1 version of the app, most notably inviting others to edit cloud documents and preset syncing.
where is the midrage / pro level M1 mac's (Score:2)
where is the midrage / pro level M1 mac's
That don't max at 16GB ram and limited video out
Re:where is the midrage / pro level M1 mac's (Score:5, Insightful)
where is the midrage / pro level M1 mac's
32GB is 6 to 8 months away. Maybe in September for the start of the school year. More likely, ready for Christmas.
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I think we'll see everything announced at WWDC *except* the Mac Pro. They might not be available to purchase at the time, but we'll have clarity on the lineup.
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Re: where is the midrage / pro level M1 mac's (Score:1)
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Yeah, the M1 seems like it makes sense for basic MacBooks and Mac Minis but seems to not make any sense when you want to get into the professional and super high performance market. The graphics processing on the M1 isn't even comparable to a proper external GPU. If they want to move forward with the M1 as their only architecture they will have to address the issues with connecting a GPU, adding more RAM, like up to a and beyond TB which is currently supported on the Mac Pro. Going beyond things like onl
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"...doesn't seem to be there yet."
Ummm. Which part of this being a two-year transition was unclear?
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I think a 2 year transition is very optimistic given how many things seem to be missing.
Re: where is the midrage / pro level M1 mac's (Score:2)
Which bit of "yet" wasn't clear?
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Yeah - imagine if they wait to release a pro line until after they've worked out all the bugs at the consumer level. Sounds Microsoft-ish.
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For what it's worth (Score:5, Interesting)
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Except it turns out that these new M1 systems are crazy fast . Intels pace of change has been sluggish the last decade. Clearly apple doesn't want to be beholden to that.
There hasn't been a downside to this transistion, so far.
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Except it turns out that these new M1 systems are crazy fast . Intels pace of change has been sluggish the last decade. Clearly apple doesn't want to be beholden to that.
There hasn't been a downside to this transistion, so far.
There isn't any AVX on M1s. I wonder how they generated their data and what they were actually comparing, algorithm wise.
Re:For what it's worth (Score:4, Informative)
It will be carefully selected benchmarks that favour the M1. The M1 is decent in single threaded performance and memory bandwidth, but falls way behind for multithreaded and more common mixed workloads. So by carefully picking the benchmarks you can make it look good.
Interestingly this is exactly the tactic that Intel has been using for years. Then AMD overtook them in all categories and suddenly they went of benchmarking.
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I would never take Intel or any other manufacturer's benchmark as a reliable indicator until confirmed by 3rd parties. To their credit AMD do now give a lot of detail about their benchmark setups so that they are reproducible.
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The M1 isn't just an ARM processor. There may not be AVX, but it includes the "neural engine" which might provide some interesting capabilities for algorithms that can use AVX (I am just guessing, not having looked too closely). I have no idea if Adobe is taking advantage of it.
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Re: For what it's worth (Score:2)
From a quick look at NEON, it seems to be 128 bit only, which means it doesn't extend even to 256 bits. It looks to be an equivalent to SSE2, which is a year 2000 tech for Intel.
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"There hasn't been a downside to this transistion, so far."
Well sure, unless you run eGPUs, more than 16GB RAM, or other operating systems...including with virtual machines, docker containers... or play games no longer under active development (ie that aren't going to be recompiled for the M1, and would also benefit from a stronger GPU)
"Except it turns out that these new M1 systems are crazy fast"
Kind of, its honestly pretty good for a new architecture to land and show off some new ideas. But a lot of what M1 does 'crazy fast' is thanks to dedicated processor cores for specific common tasks that we'll likely see show up in A
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The M1 is the first and lowest end processor. Everything else after this is likely to be better. It's meant specifically for low-power applications, so while you're right that they don't have anything that meets the higher end spec yet, it's not because the whole architecture is flawed somehow, those are just the design tradeoffs that they made *right now* for this specific purpose.
It's still a mystery how they're going to solve the problems you mentioned and if their new processors will be as impressive as
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I really want to see the next iteration because I'm sceptical that they can scale it.
If you look at the M1 it is already pushing the limits on the memory side. It has a massive L1 cache (128k, compared to 32k for a faster Ryzen 5xxx series), and the memory is clocked very high and tightly bonded by being so physically close to the CPU cores. ARM is well known for needing a lot of bandwidth to perform well.
So where do they go next? They might be able to increase the L1 cache a bit more, although it becomes t
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I have some confidence that this is a problem that they can solve, but I expect that we'll see a narrowing of the gap. We'll likely still see some power saving (which is less important), but Apple doesn't need to blow everyone away with the new class of chip, they only need stay competitive with Intel/AMD and provide a compelling reason to get something other than an M1-based machine.
At the moment, Apple's biggest competition is themselves. I don't expect a lot of people jumping ship either way—for a
"Why You Can't" (Score:1)
a lot of what M1 does 'crazy fast' is thanks to dedicated processor cores for specific common tasks that we'll likely see show up in AMD and Intel solutions pretty quick now that the market is drooling over it.
What on earth? No. Examples needed....
The speed is related to things that you can't add on an Intel platform.... the secret is more instruction decoders [medium.com], the Intel platform cannot support any more than they have already, it's been tried. It's not just for "common tasks" but for anything that runs o
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Clearly apple doesn't want to be beholden to that.
It would be pretty embarassing if their iPad CPU performance started out-pacing their own laptops.
There hasn't been a downside to this transistion, so far.
eGPUs and Virtualization certainly have been casualties but to be fair they are pretty niche.
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I see many developers using MBPs because they are “best/most flexible least painful of all worlds“ concerning OS. One element is the capability of running a multitude of (Intel-)Windows-OS and Linux.
Virtualization (on Intel...) is the only thing that is holding me back to try a M1-MBP, currently. I sometimes need to run whatever “Enterprise“ application that is only available for Windows-Servers.
I‘m really really tempted to try whether my needs are met by remote servers and / o
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I don't see the appeal of the Macbook Pro for development. The keyboard is horrible and the Touchbar very annoying for development work. Most developers would rather have proper F keys.
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I don't see the appeal of the Macbook Pro for development. The keyboard is horrible and the Touchbar very annoying for development work. Most developers would rather have proper F keys.
The keyboard is pretty good, the touchpad is orders of magnitude better than anything I've tried on a Windows system (that's more of a lament on how all Windows laptops I've used or tried have had really bad touchpads...), and the touchbar can be set to be a permanent function key bar if you'd like.
I've head some complaints about the escape key, but if you're using vi you have worse problems than the escape key being digital rather than physical. "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" hasn't been a pr
Re: For what it's worth (Score:2)
The escape key is a non-issue. Itâ(TM)s back as a physical key on the M1 MBP and ever since the Touch Bar came out youâ(TM)ve been able to go to Preferences->Keyboard and map it onto another key, like Caps Lock.
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Until the pandemic drove up the price to nearly the cost of new, the 2015 Macbook Pro was fine for development. It was the last one before the butterfly keyboard, no touch bar, and decent CPU/RAM configurations that are a bit outdated but decent today.
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Maybe a later generation will have an add-in card with an x86 CPU. Once upon a time, Apple had a computer with PowerPC, 68k emulation, and an x86 add-in card [wikipedia.org].
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Clearly apple doesn't want to be beholden to that.
It would be pretty embarassing if their iPad CPU performance started out-pacing their own laptops.
There hasn't been a downside to this transistion, so far.
eGPUs and Virtualization certainly have been casualties but to be fair they are pretty niche.
eGPUs is a really small niche, but virtualisation of other x86 systems is rather common. A lot of developers have VMs running Windows and Linux available... While the M1 can run VMs just fine, the issue is that it can no longer run x86 VMs - which causes issues with Windows in particular. Linux exists in ARM forms that are in general just as useful as on x86, but Windows ARM is hard to get - and kind of pointless.
Re: For what it's worth (Score:3)
I haven't seen an ARM build of Windows on MSDN, so there's definitely a downside for cross platform software developers. No BootCamp support any more either. The paltry amount of memory will probably be the biggest long term drawback though.
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They aren't crazy fast, they are crazy efficient.
Intels pace of change has been sluggish the last decade. Clearly apple doesn't want to be beholden to that.
This has zero to do with being beholden to the pace of a technological development. Apple is a vertical integrated company, and dependence on x86 has no negative impact on them in relation to everyone else who also uses x86. They simply don't want to be beholden to a supplier of a core component, especially when they already license ARM and design chips for other reasons.
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They aren't crazy fast, they are crazy efficient.
Two sides of the optimization coin. If it can run efficient, you can drive up the clock rate and cool it properly for better performance.
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May be the same coin, but call a spade a spade. There's a difference between saying that the M1 is an x86 killer and saying the M1 is an x86 killer in condensed slate devices and ultra thin laptops that would otherwise sacrifice performance for cooling.
Mind you speaking of cooling, have you ever noticed the previous generation Mac's didn't have a fan on the CPU, but instead were relying on movement of air through the chassis? Remember that factoid when you compare performance specs in Intel Macs vs M1 Macs.
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We don't disagree. I predict that the one thing that will hold back the ARM Macs is their fear of proper cooling. They already had i9 systems that ran slower than i7 due to thermal throttling.
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Only downside for me has been virtualization, but I've been testing Parallels (ARM) and UTM (basically a QEMU wrapper). Both work well enough and UTM can emulate all sorts of systems, but it's not the fastest. Good in a pinch.
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Except it turns out that these new M1 systems are crazy fast .
All of the benchmarks have been based on previous generation CPU's. Sure, my PC designed with midrange stuff 4 years ago will be 50% slower than the band new stuff. The fact Apple sat on old processors, motherboards and tech for quite a while, then when they finally released new stuff could announce that everything was faster should not be impressive to anybody.
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Re: For what it's worth (Score:2)
Cook isn't going to make decisions like Jobs. He's not a computer person and I don't really think he understands what's going on.
Actually, Tim Cook is a Published Developer:
https://www.macrumors.com/2018... [macrumors.com]
So, I think with his Industrial Engineering Degree and his at least moderate grasp of Software Development, he is at least as much of a âoecomputer personâ as Jobs; who pawned-off his embedded development Projects at Atari onto Woz...
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Because Apple has the capacity to make their own chips. One huge reason Apple went from PowerPC to x86 was because Motorola and later IBM never treated Apple as a special customer - they were far more interested in serving their existing customers with solutions for them, and Apple's solutions were a bonus. It's why the top of the line Macs were always sold out - Motorola
Re:For what it's worth (Score:5, Interesting)
"It will have no chance beating an i7 or i9, which is why the ARM Macs have taken over the low end units..."
Except that it does. I bought an M1 for testing and there are many circumstances in which it can outperform my 16" MBP i9 w/64GB.
For example, I have an Xcode project where the M1 is about 25% faster than the same thing on the i9.
What happens when Apple builds an M1X or M2 with 12-16 cores?
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Switching the x86 platform was the smartest thing they ever did. No idea why they are switching away from it still. They are clearly lost.
Unfortunately there is no way to mark a post as "Wrong".
Apple has no problems whatsoever switching between different processors. Unless you managed to have code that is really tightly bound to a specific processor (like using inline assembly without having a plain C version), you should be able to just recompile your code. And for anything not working that way, they have a built-in compiler.
The reason for the switch is that the M1 processor is bloody fast. It's a low end processor with 4 performance c
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> No idea why they are switching away from it still. They are clearly lost.
The Mac transitioned [wikipedia.org] from the Motorola 68K, to PowerPC, to x86 and now to Apple Silicon.
Apple
* had one of their launches get screwed over [reddit.com] by Nvidia -- it got delays which end up costing them. They never want to be in that same position again with Intel (CPU) or AMD (GPU),
* sees fixing all the security vulnerabilities causing a performance hit along with AVX512 being a power virus [realworldtech.com] of x86 made them concerned,
* having ARM on the iPho
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Yeah, 50% faster than it was before the update (on the same hardware). I feel like a lot of people are getting tripped up by this. Why is it so difficult to understand?
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An article I read on MacRumors said on the M1 some things were up to 50% faster compared to Intel systems running the Rosetta 2 emulation layer. That's net entirely an apples to apples comparison (NPI). But still impressive.
While you're technically correct, it's a distinction largely without difference. Take a look at the benchmarks [petapixel.com] and you'll see that there's only an overall performance gap of 3% between x86 Photoshop running natively on Intel and x86 Photoshop running on the M1 via Rosetta. As such, it really doesn't matter which one you're comparing against when talking about the improvement seen with the jump to an ARM-native app. Using these benchmarks, we're talking about a 43% overall improvement one way and a 47% overa
Specs? (Score:2)
It sounds impressive but I'd need to see the specs of the comparative Intel system to be sure.
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Those weaselly words "similarly configured previous generation systems".
Intel Macbooks and Mac Minis were never known for their speed. If you wanted a fast mac, you opted for a 16" macbook pro, imac, or mac pro.
That said, the M1 macbooks and M! mac mini are speedy.
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Exactly. Similarly speced probably means integrated GPU and Intel has never been great for that. That's still a point in the M1's favour though.
How bad was their Intel code (Score:5, Insightful)
Then again the M1 is sort of a purpose built part, so it was probably built with Adobe's suit in mind. Every Mac user I know falls into a few categories, Unix guy that doesn't want to faff about with Linux wifi drivers and Active Directory support (or lack thereof), college kid with extra cash, or some kind of Adobe user. Even the musicians (like my brother) have switched over to Windows. Not sure when by they got the latency issues sorted out.
I guess it is kind of neat there's a mass market PC that isn't Intel based again. Be cooler if it was an Amiga though... Or a new Atari Falcon.
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I think you're right, though there is another catagory - old people who bought in during the period Apple were advertising that 'macs just work' or that that they were easy to use.
I'm going to provide anecdotal support as well for your position - I used to work in print media. Adobe always seems to run better on Apple (and I have both Apple and winbox on my desk right now). I'm also a musician. I have NEVER plugged my Steinberg interface into my apple. What's the point?
The only reason I run Adobe on my PC m
One thing about Macs (Score:3)
Macs can be massively under powered especially for the money, but you won't usually get a lemon the way you can with PCs. Mind you, I knew not to buy that Toshiba but nobody listens to me (I told them to buy either a Lenova or an Asus, even a freakin Dell if they had to
Re: One thing about Macs (Score:1)
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It's called a 21.5" iMac with a 5400RPM hard drive, these machines are shitting themselves trying to run Big Sur, like, beachballing to launch system preferences on a clean install, brand new machine, after it's been left for a few hours for spotlight to finish indexing, caches built, etc....
These are machines sold last year.
Stick in an SSD and the issue dissapears.
Apple has a lot to answer for with Big sur and dicking over last gen intel mac purchasers who in some cases ar
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I cracked the screen on an iMac while upgrading the hard drive to an SSD (old man clumsiness). I blame Apple. But really it is my fault, for I had assumed they did not sell machines with hard drives anymore.
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Toshiba exited the consumer laptop business in the US in 2016. Their consumer models were very hit and miss, some were great and others terrible.
One nice thing about them is that they support them forever. You can go on the Dynabook website and download DOS drivers for machines from the 90s. Like many machines of that era (including Macs) the plastic parts are starting to disintegrate now.
Re: How bad was their Intel code (Score:1)
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Not sure when by they got the latency issues sorted out.
FYI it was with Vista, with the introduction of Windows Core Audio. Prior to that to get any kind of low latency in windows you had to run ASIO which was a shitshow back in the Windows XP days.
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that an architecture change got them a 50% boost? Intel CPUs are no slouches in performance, they just suck down power compared to the ARM style architecture Apple built.
It depends on what they compared to. The M1 is a speed daemon using less power for a lot more performance in the systems where it replaced Intel so far. So if they're comparing e.g. old Intel Mac minis to new M1 Mac minis this shouldn't be a problem.
Also, the M1 has some specialised hardware capabilities that will make it roll over any comparable Intel chip when it's feasible to use them. E.g. if they can make use of the M1 ML features, the M1 competes with a 20/40 core Xeon [towardsdatascience.com]. Intel has been busy with se
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From what I gather, the M1 has a lot of coprocessor hardware, so big performance gains are possible regardless of what features the core ISA supports. I remember when the PowerPC processors came out with AltiVec/VMX support and were killing it with certain Photoshop benchmarks (and Apple let everyone know it), but general-purpose performance was miserable.
I'm taking all these benchmarks with a grain of salt. I'm not convinced ARM itself is really that fast, and Apple is of course pushing SOC designs becau
Unfortunately... (Score:5, Funny)
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Probably not far from the truth. For a workload like highly optimized image processing code, the simpler ARM instruction set does less work per instruction than modern x86. For a similarly-clocked M1 to beat out an i7, there's some amount of co-processor in there accelerating things. Either there's a fixed set of functions that M1 is faster at (like an old fixed-pipeline GPU), or the co-processor is closer to being a CISC processor with really deep sleep states.
Not that an i7 "coprocessor" would be a bad th
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50% faster? So what (Score:2)
Still 100% rental
Yeah, its probably because they optimized the code (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple probably paid them to optimize the code specifically for the M1 and it's instruction set, it's much easier to optimize a program for a single processor. There are advanced caching and pipeline strategies that can vastly improve the speed of the code. For an intel this still can be done, but is probably not done as much because there are so many variations of pipelines and caches. Anyway just a theory someone should look into it.
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Thats a daft conspiracy theory if I ever heard one. Why would Apple need to do that? Creatives are the Macs number one audience (god knows they've chased off most of the other pro users), and its highly likely Macs are Adobes number one target platform. Adobe doesn't need to be paid to make sure its products are useable for its software, it needs it products useable to be competative. Adobe has all the motivation in the world without being bribed by a company notable for not collaborating with outsiders any
Well that makes the M1 super amazing then (Score:2)
Apple probably paid them to optimize the code specifically for the M1 and it's instruction set, it's much easier to optimize a program for a single processor.
Since they've had years to do that for common intel chips, and months to do that for M1 chips, it means that the M1 chip is vastly easier to optimize for... if your statement were actually true.
So I'm curious if you really think the M1 is vastly easier to optimize for and thus everyone should switch to it ASAP, or if you think toy were wrong.
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It means that the M1 chip is vastly esier to optimize for
Faulty line of reasoning.
Simply because it was only announced in late 2020 doesn't mean copies of pre-production silicon haven't been out for a while, and that they didn't find their way into the hands of Adobe.
It also doesn't mean platform optimization is "easier".
It may mean, depending on the platform, there are limits on what "optimization" can achieve.
Especially between successive generations of software and not taking into account CPU speed/IPC efficiencies.
And yes, Apple probably DID funnel cash Adobe
Re: Well that makes the M1 super amazing then (Score:2)
Adobe might have known long before other companies about Apple's plans, but they would have been under NDA. Adobe have a large number of third party vendors and would not have been able to tell them about this or easily got them started on ARM ports and optimisations.
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Even if this is true, it's sort of the point, isn't it? Buy a Mac and your vendor can (and has) super-optimised their code to run on your machine. Buy a PC, and well, because it could be one of a gazilion different configurations, well, they can't really optimise for them all, so they didn't really bother.
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Apple probably paid them to optimize the code specifically for the M1 and it's instruction set,
They did. Apple has been paying Adobe, probably for years, to keep their products on the Mac. Something is happening at Adobe. I know of at least two Mac developers that are leaving, now. It's not clear what is going on but the writing on the wall is Adobe will drop the Mac soon. The cost of converting software, unless Apple pays for it, isn't worth what the ports will bring in.
With that being said I truly doubt that Adobe will leave the Mac market. I suspect that a secret deal will be made whe
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it is cool for sure, I have it, but the only thing superior about Pixelmator is that it doesn't need a subscription.
Well, that's not insignificant.
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So? Users don't care about frameworks, zealots do.
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People that are working in Photoshop, Lightroom, or Illustrator all day don't care about native frameworks. They want their Adobe interface muscle memory to get their tasks done quickly enough.
i guarantee I won't be able to work as fast in Pixelmator as I could in Ps or Lightroom simply because I don't know the interface as well. I don't want to hunt down the specific hidden panel that does tone mapping or whatever.
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Just what I've always wanted... (Score:1, Insightful)
Third time's the charm? (Score:2, Troll)
Well, eight features simply don't work native and six others are buggy-to-unusable.
Certainly better than being caught flatfooted in the Mac Intel transition, delivering a native app most-of-a-year later.
They had a bad launch (Score:1)
This is a report on the bad launch.
It's not a comment on arch speed.
Threadripper clearly mops the floor with M1.
Oh boy. (Score:1, Interesting)
More of the BS benchmark crap again.
Oh yeah! On these 4 specific filters, the Apple platform runs faster!
WOO! Apple RULES!
What they DON'T say is that on roughly 100 MORE, the Wintel setup is either as-fast or faster.
Or that the filters run so fast, a 50% improvement isn't detectable without benchmarking software.
Yep! Kinda-Blur takes 0.004 milliseconds on Windows!
But on the Mac, it takes 0.002 milliseconds! OMGS0F@$7!!!
New processors tend to be faster than old... (Score:2)
... didn't we already know that?
I bet a less bloated PC suite would perform better (Score:2)
... than photoshop does now with all it's DRM and other bundled 'functionality' that a fraction of a percent wants.
Maybe the M1 Macs got an app rewrite without all the bloat taking up system resources.
"compared to analogous Intel Macs" (Score:2)
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Apple are only selling 20 million Macs a year, yet they are able to match Intel's best CPU offerings with their first attempt at an ARM SoC. Apple have booked TSMC's entire 5nm production capability for themselves.
I don't know what Intel will be doing 10 years from now. Possibly using their remaining fabs to churn out cheap low-end CPUs.
Apple might sell only 20 million Macs a year, but they sell somewhere around 200 million iPhones and iPads per year. Most of the CPU is identical.