Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher all get M1, macOS Big Sur updates

Affinity Mac Apple Silicon Updates (Image credit: Affinity)

What you need to know

Affinity today announced updates to its entire suite of creative apps.
Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher all got updates.
All three now support macOS Big Sur and Apple silicon.

Affinity today announced new updates to Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher that bring macOS Big Sur and Apple silicon support to the suite of apps.

The new updates are all available ahead of the arrival of new Mac mini, MacBook Air, and 13-inch MacBook Pro orders placed by buyers earlier this week. And Affinity has everything optimized to make the best of that new silicon.

With our apps now primed for this transition, Mac customers with M1 can expect a more responsive user experience with respect to painting, pixel editing, filter effects, document rendering and more. It also enables many more elements like adjustment layers and live filters to be maintained before performance suffers—allowing for a more non-destructive workflow, even on the most complex of documents.

In fact, Affinity reckons we can look forward to increases of around 3x, depending on the hardware you're comparing to.

To sum it up, M1 makes our apps run faster, smoother and feel more responsive than ever before (we've already even seen speed increases of over 3x faster running on the new MacBook Air). It's definitely a big step forward for Mac, and we can't wait to see how the rest of the Mac range develops with Apple silicon in the future.

Existing users of the Affinity apps can update them now for free. Everyone else can buy them direct from the Affinity website.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.