Professional photographer tests Apple’s MacBook M1

As a professional photographer, I was intrigued when Apple ditched Intel’s chips and instead started using its own M1 silicon in the MacBook lineup. The performance Apple promised was attractive – as was the supposed improvement in battery life – but I was worried that I would have to run my professional software on a platform that was not yet properly supported by some of the tools I use daily.

I have spent time now with the 13-inch MacBook Pro based on M1 (with 16GB of RAM) and ran it through a variety of tests to see how well I can work on it. Is this a safe upgrade for photographers or other creative professionals? Or should you wait for the promised software updates?

Apple’s use of its own chips may seem like a small change you never need to think about, but it has a big impact on how the software works. To get the best performance, the programs you use will need to be rewritten to take advantage of the new hardware properly.

This is potentially a problem, as it forces software developers to support two versions of their products; an Intel version and an Apple M1 version. At the time of writing, Adobe has released an M1 version of Lightroom, but not Lightroom Classic (the version that I, along with most photography pros, still use). The industry standard Photoshop only supports M1 when you download the beta, and Adobe hasn’t officially given any kind of timeline for when all of its Creative Cloud apps will fully support Apple M1.

So it’s useless for photographers?

Not at all. While these apps aren’t optimized, they’ll still work, thanks to Apple’s Rosetta 2 software, which allows Intel versions of the software to run normally. This means that any app that you would normally want to use on your MacBook will still be able to run on the new model without any difference in how it works, and you probably won’t see much performance degradation, although this can vary from app to app. .

In my hands-on testing, I found the M1 versions of Adobe’s apps to run extremely fast. Lightroom ran at lightning speed and allowed for blazingly fast editing and exporting. Even Lightroom Classic (the Intel version) still performed well when used through Rosetta 2.

The improvements are noticeable when using M1 optimized versions. I tested how long it took for Photoshop (both in Intel beta and M1) to line up 19 raw images at full resolution and then merge them into a stacked image. It’s a technique that I use regularly in my product photography, so it’s important for me to have good efficiency here.

Intel-based Photoshop, via Rosetta 2, took 50.3 seconds to align the layers and 1 minute and 37 seconds to merge them. I compared it to a Exceptionally powerful Windows desktop PC which was built with an AMD Ryzen 9 3950 X processor, Nvidia RTX Titan graphics and 128 GB of RAM, specifically to be a beast with 8K photo and video editing. The PC took 20 seconds to align the layers and 53 seconds to merge them – a clear victory for the PC.

I then performed the same tests on the beta version of Photoshop which supports Apple M1. It took 22 seconds to align the layers and 46.6 seconds to merge them – an overall time faster than my extremely powerful editing rig was able to achieve.

In the M1-supported version of Lightroom, it took the MacBook 6.4 seconds to import 100 raw images, exceeding the PC’s 7.1-second time to complete the same task.

Total time to complete focus stack in Adobe Photoshop (align and merge layers)

MacBook Pro (Intel version of Photoshop)

MacBook Pro (M1 optimized Photoshop beta)

The story was similar when it comes to exporting video to Premiere. The Intel version of Premiere took 6 minutes and 25 seconds to export to the MacBook M1, but the optimized beta M1 took about half the time, at 3 minutes, 24 seconds. For reference, my office did the same export in 1:20.

Total time to export Full HD video to Adobe Premiere

MacBook Pro (Intel version of Premiere)

MacBook Pro (M1 Optimized Premiere Beta)

Other software that is not optimized will still perform normally, and you will never know that you are running “emulated” versions of software, as the overall performance of the machine is still excellent. It took 51 seconds to import 100 raw images into Capture One professional image editing software, and the desktop wasn’t very up to 48 seconds. Capture One has stated that an optimized version for M1 is coming in an update, but we’re not sure when that will be.

DaVinci Resolve Studio professional video software is also available in beta for M1, and I found it to be extremely quick to use, with no issues previewing 4K files in a timeline.

Overall I am impressed. Even when running unoptimized versions of apps, the MacBook Pro M1 still struggles with an overpowered edition PC, and the fact that it is able to outperform the PC on some tests when using it. beta-optimized applications M1 is amazing. I’m certainly excited about the performance improvements we’ll see as more developers fully optimize their software for Apple’s silicon.

If you are a photographer and thinking of upgrading, I would absolutely say the MacBook M1 is a safe bet. At the very least, you will still be able to use all your current software as usual through Rosetta 2, and by the time the official M1 versions are released, that improved performance – and likely the savings in battery life – will be. extremely welcome.

Read more: MacBook Air M1 review: big changes from Apple silicon and Big Sur