11 great apps ready for the new 2020 M1 Mac

This year saw the introduction of the first Macs to be powered by Apple’s own silicon in place of Intel chips. As evidenced by our reviews of the M1 MacBook AirAnd the MacBook Pro 13-inchAnd and Mac miniThese machines are incredibly powerful and deliver wickedly fast performance. This is especially true for apps that are designed to work on locally and take full advantage of Apple’s latest technology.

In this context, this year’s Mac apps list will focus on some of the software that is already optimized for this new era of Apple devices. Picks last year It remains relevant and useful today if you are using an Intel machine. But if you’ve got the knack (or gift-giving of yourself) one of the new high-speed Macs, these are some great ways to sample what they can do.

We have gathered your favorite and most used games, apps, and entertainment. Check out our app picks for IphoneAnd the Android phonesAnd the Windows computersAnd and Mac computers equipped with M1; Our favorite mobile games from Apple Arcade And the Google Play Pass; Our top picks for Gaming computers, The PS5And the Xbox One and Series X / SAnd the Nintendo SwitchAnd and VR. We have also listed our favorite streaming programs on Disney Plus, Hulu, ESPN PlusAnd and Netflix; Some Fantastic science fiction books; And the Exciting new podcasts. (Note: Pricing is accurate at time of publication but may change.)

Pixelmator Pro

Pixelmator Pro is one of the best photo editing app for Mac. It contains the usual set of RAW editing tools, presets, advanced layer editing, photo filters, and makes it easy to control every detail of your photos. What sets Pixelmator Pro apart is the automatic adjustments that can be made through its machine learning algorithm that has been trained with more than 20 million images. The recent update also allows for more customization of the interface, allowing you to place everything in the place most convenient for your workflow. And in a world where so many creative apps ask for a subscription, I really appreciate the $ 19.99 one-time price for everything this app gives you.

Pixelmator Pro iPad app ($ 4.99) Great too – especially if you like retouching things with the Apple Pencil, which is the way I edit many of my captions.

Lightroom

Lightroom is the first hugely popular Adobe app optimized for Apple’s M1 Silicon. And for many people, this is the default option for editing and organizing their photo collection. The app has now been updated to take advantage of the power of Apple’s M1 chip to make this editing faster.

Keep in mind that this is the regular version of Lightroom; Lightroom Classic does not run natively on the M1, but Adobe says there are no known issues getting it to work with Rosetta 2. In my experience, Lightroom Classic looks very similar to how it performs on an Intel Mac.

An original M1 version of Photoshop is set to follow sometime next year, but Adobe has not provided release timeframes for other apps like Premiere Pro.

Google Chrome and Firefox

Two of the major browsers, Chrome and Firefox, have already been updated to work natively on the M1 Macs, so you shouldn’t encounter any problems or erratic performance degradation when using either of them. In the case of Chrome, just make sure to select “Mac with Apple chip” when downloading – otherwise you’ll end up installing an Intel version, which will continue to work, but not efficiently.

Microsoft Edge currently has M1 support in its beta channel, so it shouldn’t be too far either.

Imaginary

If Apple’s built-in calendar app isn’t doing it for you, Fantastical might be the more advanced alternative you’re looking for. Its natural language analyzer can convert regular sentences about your plans into a fully formatted appointment entry. You can adjust the display of your calendar exactly the way you want, and Fantastical has widgets that you can enter in the “Today” sidebar on the Mac. There is a free basic version; The premium version, which starts at $ 4.99 per month, provides additional features such as the ability to add tasks, full screen view, and calendar synchronization.

Microsoft 365

Microsoft quickly updated its entire Mac lineup to fully optimize Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook and OneNote for M1. So you should notice very fast performance when working with any of them. I’m sure many people would prefer these apps over Apple’s productivity apps like Pages and Numbers.

Twitter

Hear me: The Twitter app for macOS really does pretty well. It took some polishing and bug fixes to get to this point, but Twitter for Mac is now full-featured, responsive, and not as crash-prone as it was before. If you haven’t given the original Twitter app a chance yet, now is the time.

If you still prefer a third-party app, Tweetbot It’s still the go-to, and it’s also universal and M1-ready.

iMazing

IMazing is a great device manager to search everything on your iPhone or iPad. You can create backups (different from Apple Backups) and grab your messages, photos, music, and more directly from the device.

But it was also discovered shortly after the M1 Macs launched that this program could be used for “sideloading” and installing iPhone apps – even those not yet subscribed – into macOS. If you are giving this a try, just expect that not everything will work flawlessly.

IMazing also recently added an option to clearly see which apps are common on your system or developed by Intel.

Bartender

If you have a cluttered menu bar clutter at the top of your Mac’s screen, Bartender can help you get things organized. One of our long-time favorite macOS tools, this app lets you neatly hide everything under a single menu bar icon to ease the clutter. You can also set triggers so that certain icons only appear at times when it makes the most sense.

Neural Mix Pro

Neural Mix Pro is an app that lets you separate the different parts of a song – vocals, instruments, and beats – and listen to them individually. You can also change the tempo of the song without spoiling the pitch. Useful tool for DJs and musicians, as it only appeals to the indoor musician. The end result sometimes still looks like a y phase (like most audio removal software) and it has some artifacts, but it does a better job than the other apps I’ve tried for this. Just know that it is quite pricey compared to the other recommendations here; You will have to pay $ 50 to open the app.

BetterTouchTool

If you’ve got the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Apple’s M1 chip, that means you’ve also got your liked or hated Touch Bar above the keyboard. There are ways Customize it to your liking in macOS settingsBut BetterTouchTool is a tool that gives you more flexibility in terms of what happens when you use the Touch Bar, allowing you to quickly click useful shortcuts to your most important apps.