A few of my close friends have noted, year after year, how dramatically far ahead the iPad’s hardware is in relation to its software. Year in, year out, the iPad’s pure processing power jumps through what seems like an impossible ceiling.

This is what hit me today when watching Apple’s secret underground computing lair show off the seamless transition to Apple’s own ARM chips. In short, we saw an iPad Pro chip inside a Mac running Adobe Lightroom on a Pro Display XDR, all without skipping a beat.

I’ve chosen to edit photos on an iPad for the better part of 18 months now. Which is especially due to how smoothly Lightroom runs on an iPad (at least in comparison to how it runs on a Mac). If you want to compare the two, take any Mac and make a selective edit in Lightroom with a mask overlaid on top of where you want to edit the photo. Now make that same edit on the iPad with the Apple Pencil.

Yes, now you know how bad things have become in Adobe land on the Mac.

Now that the iPad’s ultra-smooth editing performance is coming to the Mac, you can bet I’ll be buying that ARM iMac as soon as it’s available.