Summary
- Adobe Illustrator now available in beta for Windows on Arm, fulfilling promises made by Adobe in the past.
- The addition of Illustrator gives graphic designers access to one of the most popular vector graphics apps with native performance.
- Momentum is building for Windows on Arm with more apps adding native support, including DaVinci Resolve and Slack, enhancing the viability of these laptops.
For years, Adobe has been making promises about getting its apps to run on Windows on Arm and then taking far too long to deliver on those promises. But finally, the company has kept one such promise. The company has now made Adobe Illustrator available in beta for Windows on Arm.
Adobe finally takes Windows on Arm seriously with native versions of Premiere Pro and Illustrator coming next month
As more and more apps make the trip over to Windows on Arm, Adobe is keen not to be left in the dust.
Snapdragon laptops get one more big player
Adobe has been one of the earliest supporters of Windows on Arm, but that support has always felt half-hearted. Photoshop has been available for years, but for a long time, it was very unstable and prone to crashing, which Adobe took its sweet time to fix. Lightroom is currently the only other Creative Cloud app that works on Windows Arm PCs, such as those powered by the Snapdragon X Elite chips.
Illustrator is obviously a huge addition, since it gives graphic designers access to one of the most popular vector graphics apps with native performance. If you're working in media and need to create scalable designs that look great anywhere, this is going to be great news for you, even though it's still in beta.
Adobe had also promised to deliver a beta of Premiere Pro in July, but that is still unavailable, with just a couple of days left in the month. For video editing, right now, your best bet is DaVinci Resolve 19, which does have native Arm support in the latest beta.
Momentum is building
Illustrator is just the latest in a wave of apps that have been adding native support for Windows on Arm in recent months. The aforementioned DaVinci Resolve is a big one that also added support recently, and Slack has also recently been updated to run natively on Arm. That one is also a big deal because the old x86 version was pretty slow on Arm.
There's more, too. Just about every major browser now runs natively on Arm, including Google Chrome, making it feasible for the majority of people to get a Windows on Arm laptop and run their apps without a problem. Hopefully, that momentum continues and makes these laptops even more viable. Especially for gaming, which is still a big pain point of these devices.