Adobe launches M1 Mac-native versions of more Creative Cloud apps including Lightroom Classic and Illustrator, claims 80%+ faster performance than Intel Macs
Context & Ripple Effects
Adobe's M1-native rollout has been incremental: Arm Photoshop betas for Windows and macOS arrived in November 2020, followed in March by an Apple Silicon-optimized Photoshop claiming a 1.5X gain over Intel. Today's launch extends native builds to Lightroom Classic and Illustrator, with Adobe now claiming 80%+ faster performance versus Intel Macs — a bigger jump than Photoshop's earlier figure.
Adobe is the last of the major creative-software holdouts to finish the port: Pixelmator shipped a native Pixelmator Pro 2.0 back in November 2020 touting up to 15x ML Super Resolution gains, and Mozilla's M1-native Firefox 84 landed that December with 2.5x faster launch times.
First-order effects
- Creative Cloud subscribers on M1 Macs get native Lightroom Classic and Illustrator instead of running them through Rosetta translation, closing the performance gap on the two apps many pros still ran Intel versions of.
- The 80%+ claim raises the bar inside Adobe's own lineup — its March Photoshop release promised only a 1.5X improvement, so remaining Intel-era apps now face pressure to show comparable gains when they go native.
Second-order effects
- Native challengers like Pixelmator lose part of their speed advantage over Adobe on M1 Macs, forcing them to compete on price and features rather than raw Apple Silicon performance.
- With Adobe's flagship apps natively fast on Apple Silicon, Intel Macs lose their last practical selling point for creative buyers, accelerating the migration decision for studios and freelancers still holding Intel machines.
Third-order effects
- If every major creative app goes M1-native within roughly a year of the chip's launch, as this pattern shows, Apple's platform transition succeeds without the software-vacuum period that historically made architecture switches painful — and Intel's relevance to pro computing shrinks accordingly.
- Performance-per-watt claims like Adobe's 80%+ figure become the new marketing currency for professional software vendors, shifting competitive benchmarks from feature parity to silicon-specific optimization.
The trend: Apple's silicon transition is being validated app-by-app, and Adobe's completion of the Creative Cloud port marks the point where professional creative software no longer holds the ecosystem back.