Apple Silicon M1 Macs will finally include Adobe Photoshop, one of the most important programs in the Mac ecosystem. Today Adobe announced that its flagship image editing software will run natively on the latest Macs.

The Apple M1 chip-based Mac was released in November, but many popular applications needed time to fully convert to Apple's new ARM-based chip (programs were written for x86-based Intel processors). As a result, many applications, including Photoshop, ran in emulation with Apple's Rosetta 2 technology. Adobe promises to benefit greatly from this conversion, and according to our tests, the new Macs will definitely be able to take advantage of it.

Adobe's announcement article states that "internal tests show that a wide range of features run on average 1.5 times faster than similarly configured previous-generation systems." These performance gains should ease the concerns of users who have been wondering whether now is the time to buy or whether they need to wait for the MacBook Pro 2021.

Adobe based its testing on "a wide range of activities, including opening and saving files, running filters, and performing compute-intensive operations." As a result, tasks like Content-Aware Fill and Select Subject "feel noticeably faster." In other words, they do not need a stopwatch to visually see the difference.

The post, written by Pam Clark, Vice President of Photoshop Product Management & Product Strategy, even warns that if you blink, "you might miss the splash screen activation." Those with Photoshop experience are probably chuckling, as Adobe's loading screen has become synonymous with Photoshop.

Adobe attributes the success of the new version to the public beta testing that began around the launch of the Apple Silicon Mac.

In a review of the MacBook Pro with M1, they noted that the MacBook Pro scored 576.6 on the PugetBench Photoshop test, below the Dell XPS 13's 588 and the Asus ZenBook 13's 743.

This was based on an emulated version of Photoshop running on Rosetta 2, so this new version should bring the M1 Mac closer to PC parity.

However, this post acknowledges that Photoshop is not yet fully there on the M1 Mac. It states that two features, "Invite to Edit Cloud Documents" and "Synchronize Presets," are not yet included.

In this post, Adobe notes that it did not wait because "the performance improvements in other parts of the application were so great." Adobe stated that the team is finishing work on these features, so we should not have to wait too long.

Users will have the option to "switch to the [Rosetta 2] build" of Photoshop if necessary.