I said that the M1 MacBook Pro “changes everything” and called the M1 Mac mini “the best Mac for most photographers,” and while I was pretty confident, snarky comments have a way of making you doubt your own sanity. I thought the first run was a mistake by the 6th I was forced to start believing my eyes.Īs a reviewer, you’re always worried that you’ve over-sold something that really impressed you. To see the scores jump this much, when Rosetta 2 was already doing such a great job with the x86 version of Photoshop, was frankly mind-blowing. Even a $6,700 fully-loaded 16-inch MacBook Pro with an 8-core Intel Core i9 and discrete GPU takes 1 minute and 52 seconds.Īll of this from a chip that sips power so slowly that we were able to get almost 16 hours of 4K video playback out of the M1 MacBook Pro we reviewed in December.įinal Thoughts: What Does This Mean for Creatives?Īfter the lackluster improvements that we saw when we compared Apple Silicon-optimized Lightroom against the x86 version running via Rosetta 2, we didn’t come into this test with high hopes. The M1 Mac mini running optimized Photoshop does this same task in 1 minute and 14 seconds. What does that mean in real terms? An Intel-based 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 2.3GHz quad-core i7 and 32GB of RAM takes about 2 minutes and 45 seconds to merge a 6-photo panorama shot on the Nikon D850 (full res. Running optimized Photoshop, the M1 Mac mini hit 130+ in run after run after run. What’s more, none of the computers we’ve reviewed, not even the most expensive 16-inch MacBook Pro you can buy or the Razer Blade Studio Edition, has ever broken the 100 mark on the PugetBench Photo Merge test.

But even with this score working against it, the Mac mini running Apple Silicon-optimized Photoshop managed to get the second highest Overall score we’ve ever seen out of PugetBench.

Unsurprisingly, the M1 Mac mini loses to the competition in raw GPU performance, more-or-less matching the onboard graphics of the quad-core Core i7 that’s in the 13-inch MacBook Pro ( full review here). Results: Apple Silicon vs Rosetta 2 vs Intel

Photoshop elements apple m1