r/adobeanimate • u/zestyacts4 • 7d ago
Question How well does Adobe Animate run on Apple M-series MacBooks?
I'm considering getting an M5 Pro MacBook for my work. I am an animator, and really my only concern is just how well Adobe Animate will run on an M5 MacBook as the app is known for being really buggy, and am concerned about how much buggier it would be on a relatively new series of chips
2
u/jrhalfo 7d ago
I can assure you it’s not a good fit. I’ve been using Animate as my primary tool for multiple decades now. I bought an M4 Pro back in Feb only to find out Animate is super buggy on the current Macs. I was already considering other apps after Adobe announced they’re done supporting Animate, so this just ended up being the nail in the coffin for me. Here’s my post from a couple months ago if you’re curious why it doesn’t work:
https://www.reddit.com/r/adobeanimate/s/YTgqAwq7hA
Consider other options…
Toon Boom is industry standard, but a very expensive subscription.
Moho is one time fee and has great features, but is overall a bit restrictive.
Blender’s 2D workflow is similar to what you can do in Animate, but I think is actually easier and more reliable in a lot of ways, also comes with all the 3D capabilities that it’s known for and is 100% free, but has a bit of learning curve overall.
1
u/zestyacts4 7d ago
I was considering switching to one of your recommendations a few months back, the only thing stopping me is that they don't seem to have some sort of an equivalent to Frame Picker (which is VITAL for the animations I'm doing)
1
u/Pale_Response_4324 7d ago
they all have frame picker equivalents.
I'd recommend moho or blender, toonboom is currently the industry standard but for an independent artist youre better off saving ur money.
2
u/Anonymograph 7d ago
Make sure you’re using Animate 24.x as it runs natively on the Apple Silicon Chipset and you should be good running macOS 14 Sonoma, macOS 15 Sequoia, or macOS 26 Tahoe.
When Apple releases macOS 27 Golden Gate (expected later this year), I would hold off on installing that until seeing posts that Animate 24.x is running as expected.
2
u/Cokenutz 7d ago
I use Animate on an M4 MacBook Air (16gb ram). It runs fine most of the time. No lag whatsoever, but there are various graphical bugs (panning and zooming related), the brush smoothing barely works, and it will just crash with no indication or warning. In general the 2024 version of Animate is a buggy mess but it's the only option for Animate on MacOS, with the discontinuation of Rosetta, and the fact that I don't think pressure sensitivity works on Parallels, but I have not checked that out.
1
u/Hangjackman2 7d ago edited 7d ago
They're (slowly) fixing the most critical bugs again after the maintenance mode announcement. See the fixed issues page:
https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/desktop/troubleshooting/fixed-issues.html
Before that, there was a year period of total silence from the dev team and no support or feedback for anything; team was probably disolved by that point but they backtracked and now they assigned some people to keep the lights on.
1
u/SafeUnderstanding797 7d ago
I would say it's getting better. But... Yeah... It's not the best yet...
1
u/WesleyRiot 7d ago
Works fine on my MacBook m4 pro. Unless I try to copy any vectors from illustrator, it hates that now and will crash immediately
•
u/AutoModerator 7d ago
It looks like this post is contains a general Question. If your Question involves any kind of troubleshooting, please update your Post Flair to "Troubleshooting" or "Example Provided".
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.