msandersen

Most of this discussion is somewhat off-topic to the OP question, ie the fact he has 2 of the 3, and if there is an individual upgrade discount. At any rate, while I think maintaining the sale price for people who upgrade beyond January 25th would be advantageous (inc on individual apps), even though it is a lot for me on a disability pension for the whole package, having thought about it I know I would regret it later if I didn't upgrade for various reasons, and I'm happy to support their work after having received free updates for so long. If it was in the budget, even the full price would be worth it, even if Publisher wouldn't get as much use. An interesting aspect to me is the universal license with iPad, and since I have a 1st gen iPad Pro on which Affinity Photo works great, this should be interesting. Going through the list of improvements, what I am trying to determine is what is not mentioned; under-the-hood refactoring, which can be as great or greater amount of work to do, and there is some indication of this in the feature list, and from reviews I've heard the Raw development in Photo has greatly improved. What I am looking to see is improvements in Channel and Mask workflow, in V1 there are some clunkiness that makes it much less versatile compared to Photoshop. I saw you can now combine masks with boolean operators, this is great, I'm looking forward to trying it out. Don't estimate the amount of work which has gone on in the backend, which has huge ramification for all the apps.

I don’t have my M1 Mac Mini yet, but in looking at early reviews, as with a lot of photography Youtubers, they obsess about video editing performance, seeing as the are Youtubers, it’s what they do now, not so much photography. I saw this earlier in iPad Pro reviews (pre-M1) too with Luma Fusion performance outperforming large PC editing rigs with smooth 4K playback with lots of edits and export times by quite a way. That all comes down to optimised decoders in the Apple silicon, not a reflection of raw CPU or GPU in general. And so the early M1 Mac Mini and MacBook reviews tested video performance endlessly too, with a few doing Lightroom export tests and very simple Photoshop tests, both before and after optimisation, but nothing too taxing. And of course all the synthetic benchmark tests. The thing to remember here is that the M1 is Apple’s very first desktop CPU, and it is put into all the low-end Macs. None of the machines they replaced were particularly powerful, and all had integrated Intel Irix graphics. What has been amazing to many of the reviewers is that these low-end M1 Macs outperform earlier Pro Macs, even Mac Pros, in certain tasks not involving a dedicated GPU. GPU-heavy tasks, be it on a Mac or PC, always do far better on a system with a dedicated GPU than any integrated graphics chip, like the M1. Again, the machines being replaced all had integrated graphics, like the M1, and in that context it is far superior to what it replaces (even the 2020 Intel 13” MacBook Pro only had Intel Irix graphics). The more powerful Pro chip(s) are about to be announced at WWDC, it is conceivable they might even do a separate GPU for thermal reasons. So yeah, I’m not surprised your Ryzen PC outperforms the M1 with 8Gb in certain tasks. If you were doing a video editing and exporting task, it would likely be a different story. And yes, 8Gb vs 16Gb of unified RAM could make a difference; in your PC (don’t remember what you said it’s specs were), your graphics card (if you have one) has it’s own dedicated RAM, separate from the 8Gb system RAM. we shall soon see what Apple has planned for their Pro machines, replacing the current Intel Macs with a graphics card. That is bound to be a major point of differentiation with the M1.

Effects -> Outer Shadow