Apple announced its plan to move from Intel chips to using its own homegrown silicon in Mac, at its annual developers conference in June. The company released a developer transition kit (DTK), which was basically a Mac Mini with an ARM based chip, back in June. The DTK was meant to allow developers to have a quickstart on optimizing their apps for the new architecture for the Mac.
The first batch of consumer products based on Apple Silicon were introduced by the company in November. Apple introduced the M1 MacBook Air, the 13” M1 MacBook Pro (base model), and the M1 Mac Mini. In the meantime, some of the third party developers as well as Apple have been able to optimize their apps for the ARM version of macOS Big Sur.
Apple has already updated all of its apps such as iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Xcode, and a lot more to take advantage of the newer and faster Apple silicon. Other companies like Google, Microsoft, and Adobe are also at work and some have already updated their apps for the new M1 Macs.
Adobe Lightroom and Microsoft Office 365 are some of the productivity apps to be optimized for the M1 Macs.
Adobe Lightroom
Lightroom by Adobe is one of the most popular photo-editing apps for light editing. The app is also used by people for arranging their photo collection on the computer. The new updated Mac version of the Apple silicon makes the app snappy. Users will see a noticeable improvement in performance compared to the Intel version of the app running on Intel Macs.
Microsoft Office 365
The go-to suite of apps for tasks like document preparation, presentation making, preparing spreadsheets, and for other work related tasks, has been Microsoft Office and continues to be. Microsoft 365 has been optimized for the M1 Mac to take advantage of the speed gains the new chips offer.
