Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Serif Updates Affinity Apps for 'Superfast Performance' With M1 Chip
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I know many photographers who have bitten the bullet and stuck with Adobe LR when they went subscription. And the reason is large libraries of photos with non-destructive edits not being able to be translated to another editor/DAM. I have every single RAW I've made since the RAW format came out (if memory serves, that was with my Canon 20D dSLR way back in mid-2000s).
A year ago I bit the bullet and went LR subscription and never looked back. Yeah the $10/mo irks me. But in the big scheme of things it's not a big deal, especially if you take photography seriously.
The good news is, way back when Aperture and LR came out around 14 years ago, I spent a lot of time evaluating both simultaneously, knowing I'd be where I am today with a ton of photos. And having concerns Apple wasn't going to be in the professional photo editing/DAM business longer than Adobe. Also, at the time, Aperture had a kludgy method for doing local/brush edits that was not non-destructive and required making a huge tiff in the process - which was insane.
So glad I chose to go with LR. And not Aperture.
Also... I really like the relatively frequent updates Adobe has added to LR's editing tools, which have been killer.
Last edited:
Would have been interesting to hear, how fast it ran before the optimization
But 3x faster is crazy. Might be the biggest performance jump on Macbooks ever. And the price didn't change at all.
I would categorize that under the usual marketing chatter.
I'm sure they got some good support from Apple during development, and the people at Affinity are smart enough to give a little something back.
They probably moved one filter from CPU to GPU and it got a lot faster that way. I even believe them when they say this is due to the shared memory architecure.
Good work nevertheless!
I love Affinity apps, but 3x faster probably won’t make me draw any better.
That's not a hardware or software problem, but a liveware problem! We're all in the same boat there I'm afraid.
The six steps of the creative process:
1. This is awesome!
2. This is difficult!
3. This is ****!
4. I am ****!
5. This might just work...
6. This is awesome!
all AMD and Intel have to do is follow the design ideas of the memory and GPU on a chip and design their own M1 Killer
Hand it over to Microsoft who already has 92 percent of the OS market around the world and APPLE gets left in the dust with just 7 percent of the OS market.
Being different can leave you in the dust not wanting to work together with Windows and active directory.
Having your computers in corporations and businesses is where the money is at.
Being different and no compatibility using an ARM M1 will shrink Apples usage percentage
Work together, compatibility is where it's at
Apples chip designs will get copied. then the Mac is history.
Hand it over to Microsoft who already has 92 percent of the OS market around the world and APPLE gets left in the dust with just 7 percent of the OS market.
Being different can leave you in the dust not wanting to work together with Windows and active directory.
Having your computers in corporations and businesses is where the money is at.
Being different and no compatibility using an ARM M1 will shrink Apples usage percentage
Work together, compatibility is where it's at
Apples chip designs will get copied. then the Mac is history.
Spoken by someone who hasn't watched the Android market for, what, the last decade? Why haven't the other ARM makers done this and used your so-called "compatibility and copy" method so Android could just win?
Most people I know buying Macs aren't buying them to run Windows. Thus, compatibility is in the file types and how the apps run them. PPC could run all the same **** Windows could run, because once companies supported open standards, everything just ran. You didn't need some Windows-only app to view/run/edit some file.
"Being different can leave you in the dust not wanting to work together with Windows and active directory."
You can always tell when someone is arguing from a "BuT WiNd0wS" mentality.
Most people I know buying Macs aren't buying them to run Windows. Thus, compatibility is in the file types and how the apps run them. PPC could run all the same **** Windows could run, because once companies supported open standards, everything just ran. You didn't need some Windows-only app to view/run/edit some file.
"Being different can leave you in the dust not wanting to work together with Windows and active directory."
You can always tell when someone is arguing from a "BuT WiNd0wS" mentality.
Continuing, you DO know that iOS is compatible with macOS, right? And they run (well, up until now) on different architectures. I swear Windows-only guys, who pretend Macs only worked because they had Intel chips, don't understand the game.
Rosetta 2 is only for running Intel software on Apple Silicon Macs, not for running AS software on Intel Macs.
In the near future most apps will have a universal binary that runs natively on both Intel and AS. Eventually the software will only be built for Apple Silicon, but this is likely to track the ending of macOS updates that support Intel hardware. So by the time the majority of software is no longer supported, you won't have the OS to support the new software anyway.
Intel Macs should get updates for quite a few years, and will continue to run after that. In the past I have used a Mac productively for years after it was no longer supported in OS updates.
I switched to Affinity + CaptureOne about a year ago. You can, and I do, keep Lightroom around, without subscription. It gives you the option to open your catalogs and export your pictures. Sure, you can't edit them anymore but you don't lose your edits that way.
Love that Affinity is so quick to update. Although they REALLY need to update the way the floating interface items work. I'm constantly fighting the floating palettes. They seem to get in the way all the time, it's infuriating! Especially on a laptop that occasionally gets attached to an external monitor. They seem to be ignoring Apple's UI guidelines on these.
I'm a bit more worried about Capture One though, they will probably take their sweet time updating for Apple Silicon. I hope I'm wrong though.
Curious about how to manage your photo library/workflow with Affinity Photo? What app do you use to view your photo library with photos you have edited with Affinity Photo.
They also had access to a Developer Transition Kits in which they could develop and test their apps and its performance against previously released hardware. They just could not talk about it due to Non disclosure agreements.
I used to use Aperture, which I loved. I kept using it until I upgraded to Catalina, now I use Apple Photos. From there I can edit my photos in On1 Photo RAW or Affinity Photo.
Last edited:
As well as their apps already run an Apple iOS Silicon so probably very little changes needed. My guess is they already had a shared code base between their windows/iOS/Mac versions
Almost certainly. Affinity were one of the developers showcased during the 'One More Thing' event (if you remember that annoying montage, switching between loads of developers). If memory serves me right, they were the ones who said it took a day to migrate their app to work on AS.
Place your bets if you think Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and Lightroom Classic are going to get support in a year.
There were developer Mac Mini's out there running the 12X or whatever. So 3X faster with that beta M1 or 3x faster with the shipping M1. Either way impressive as all get out.
Oh dear... have you not seen all those lists of eminent sages, oracles and prognosticators who, over the years, have confidently predicted that "Apple are doomed"? They all have one thing in common: they were wrong. $2 trilllion dollars worth of wrong. You just joined their club. Here's your hat.
Being different seems to be working just fine.
The yearly “Apple is doomed” prophecy
Every year, around November, short-sellers infuse the market with doubts about Apple’s money-making ability.