Adobe has announced updates to Illustrator, InDesign and Lightroom Classic - all are now native for Apple Silicon Macs running Apple’s M1 processor. Photoshop is already native

Lightroom has supported M1-based Macs natively since December, while rival Serif's Affinity apps were updated in November

Adobe has also released some pretty incendiary data that shows the performance of Creative Cloud apps is significantly better on the M1 chip - an average 83 performance uplift rising to a whopping 88 percent in Photoshop.

And if you're thinking this might only reflect a few key features like content-aware fill, you'd be wrong - expert Andreas Pfeiffer undertook 774 benchmark measures across the software suite and published a report showing all the results. 

AI features using Adobe's Sensei machine-learning tech saw around a 4-6 times uplift in performance. 

Now, there is a caveat (of course) and that is that it doesn't reflect the highest spec of Intel processor available on a Mac - you can get the iMac with Core i9 for example and of course the Mac Pro uses Intel Xeon workstation chips. 

The comparison was undertaken using the 13-inch MacBook Pro, presumably because it's the only Apple model available with both Intel and Apple chips. Both configurations have 16GB RAM and 2TB SSDs and pitched the Apple M1 versus the Intel Core i5, which is presumably the 10th generation 1038NG7 introduced early last year. It's worth noting that Intel has introduced newer 11th generation chips than that model. 

There are also several other new features coming to Creative Cloud, apps this month including: 

  • Lightroom Ecosystem: New Premium Presets, collaborative editing capabilities, Super
  • Resolution in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic (previously available in Adobe Camera Raw), and custom crop aspect ratios in Lightroom
  • Powerful new retouching features in Photoshop Express, including skin smoothing, content-aware healing, face aware liquify and caricature
  • Custom brushes in Photoshop on iPad
  • Rotate View in Illustrator on desktop
  • New styling tools in Adobe XD: Inner Shadow, Outline Stroke, and Angular Gradient