Thank you for finally making Illustrator multi-threaded. It runs like a dream now. All I had to do was buy a Mac with Apple Silicon and Illustrator has never been better. It's quicker for me to save a large AI file in iCloud drive on my intel iMac, open it on my 2022 Macbook Air, rasterize the artboard @ 600dpi, save it and wait for it to update on the iMac... than it is to simply rasterize it on the iMac. The new M2 mac mini is looking like a decent fix for this problem.

The bigger threat is actually simpler new-gen apps like Canva. Adobe has tried several times to copy this trend, but they're thinking too old school, too complicated, and too much about money-focused solutions (Adobe stock) vs user-focused solutions. Meanwhile, Canva is taking all the new-school would-be users. The new 'pros' aren't going to even consider Ai, InDesign etc. (I started by mastering Quark & Freehand, then Pagemaker/Illustrator, then InDesign, so I don't say that lightly.)

Ai could revolutionize, but it'll take someone leading with a modern vision, and more than the handful of devs currently dedicated to it.

Nah, it’s never ignored. The task is just harder than it seems and requires a lot of effort and resources. As far as I know about programming, it basically means a complete rewriting of the core. I assume this is what is being done constantly, it’s just not done yet. But this comment means little, I know. I know only some performance changes are planned, but know nothing about the scale or the timing.

I'm afraid that the developers ignore this branch on purpose. They are satisfied with the product in this form

@Nikolas Karampelas
Don't worry I have 32GB of RAM and a Samsung 960PRO M.2 HD (Read 3500mb/s / Write 2500mb/s) and Illustrator runs **** slow on mine too!

Yes Nikolas, that is exactly my point. It's like adding flashy attachements to an 20 year old car, without changing the motor. All the new features are "nice", but what's their use, when Photoshop or Illustrator are crawling in slowmotion, as soon as I use more than 4 Artboards? I have 24 cores and 64gb Ram, but have to restart my photoshop tool every few hours, because they slow down too much.

I really hope the affinity suite can catch up soon, to give some real competition.

Neff this is true, but it also make things worst. I keep on checking photoshop and illustrator from time to time (I professionally use affinity now) and I do notice that every new fancy thing they add just make the programs even more heavy and sometimes really doesn't worth the pain.
Like for example last time I checked on photoshop was in version 21 (I think? 2020 or something?) I once again wanted to check out that new auto background remover and I tried the latest version a couple of days ago.

The tool was interesting, although didn't worked always as intended but the whole app performance was abysmal... sure I don't have the latest and greatest system (Ryzen 2600, 16GB DDR4, Samsung Evo 850 SSD) but it is not a some deadhorse 2 core either.

I wonder how far this tactic will got...

edit: K-0 I think designer 2.0 is ready for making the cut with the higher tiers of graphic design world. The only thing that stand in between is the "this is what we use" mandra the bigger corporates/agencies have and "if aint broke..." mentality.
The thing is that the people who decide can't see that AI is, in fact, broken.

Pro users are stuck using AI for now. Unfortunately Affinity doesnt quite cut it yet for pros but its absolutely GREAT for new or mid-low level users.

So, Adobe, knowing this, has no incentive to improve it - only to keep it JUST good enough for pro users, and devote effort to lure new customers away Affinity. So they add "New" "Features" as selling points. Researching Grammarly rather than fix hyphenation or HSB?!?!

The ball in in Affinity's court IMHO. The AI team in particular has given us 5+ years of disrespectful customer service on this forum which is perfectly reflective of their Management's philosophy towards the userbase and the product itself.

I think Adobe know that Nikolas, that's why they are tackling on so many "fancy" features on top of the broken code, like 3D effects, machine learning filters and so on. They just ignore, that they also need to work on the foundation for that to go on.

Alastair Adobe just needs to remember what happened with Quark xPress that they beat with inDesign.
xPress was the leader but have flaws that nobody cared to fix because they where industry standard. Then came inDesign, with a ton of new features that made xPress seem like some primitive windows 3.11 era program and eventually was put aside, because by the time they realized they had rested on their laurels too long and started updating xPress, they had already lost to a better and cheaper inDesign.

It's not like Adobe isn't drowning in cash but somehow UI/UX is going to the dogs for the last few years. I used to use four Adobe products every day but now doing other things and using infrequently. It's amazing how many bugs and broken tools (very old tools too) it has on Mac. The historical fact of Adobe pushing users towards PC where they had advantages over Apple has come home to roost. Adobe don't respect Mac users. Offshoring all the coding for the last decade has had pretty bad consequences too IMHO. I've spoken to developers about vision critical bugs that they know about but can't track the source of. It's a cluster-suck of jumping from one error and bug loaded release to the next. I have to run Betas just to get something that works on Mac. It should be the opposite. I should be able to regress one versions and still keep working if need be but stuff is so out of date with Apples modern APIs that it just brakes when you update macOS (which Apple makes you do as a matter of course any time you ring them with problems).

I'm seriously thinking about the alternative, even though my professional use of the suite is now much more limited. The competitors in many ways are feature compatible and performance superior to Adobe. Adobe was always too conservative and profit driven (destroying, sorry acquiring, Macromedia for that purpose) but now even the good aspects of a conservative approach i.e. stable consistently performant software is now not even something we can bank on.

My sister worked at Kodak in the digital division when they invented the digital camera and were market number one in consumer class digital cameras in several regions like Asia/Pacific. But the greed had corrupted the higher executive levels and they thought the rivers of gold from printing photos and selling film would continue to flow for decades more, it caught them out and we all know the rest of the story.

Adobe executives would do well to read Willy Sih's books and papers especially this one: (He lead the digital division), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308670106_The_real_lessons_from_Kodak's_decline

LoL @Andrew... yeup.......

@Jeron yep - super frustrating. XD seems way too simple, but then you find all the complexity under the hood and it can do a surprising amount. And I think things like the per-canvas layer stack are things I can never live without now. Layers are odd at first but make a ton of sense as you work with them. Also - free plugins help bridge a lot of gaps. XD needs updates as well - of course - but it's definitely an app made for doing modern work, and it feels great using it. Super speeeeeedy!

I do not care anymore I am buying 7950x for home. If I can't use it for Illustrator I will have this at least for gaming ;D. If both task are not up spec of this processor then my last hope is going to be Blender.

Oh wow, I just woke up from a sixteen year coma and bought my first multithreaded CPU! I'm so excited to see how my favorite computer program Adobe Illustrator works on my blazing fast new hardware.

...Oh.

@Jayse Fair enough guess we're all just frustrated that we're having to find work arounds to get work done instead of Adobe fixing fundamental issues. Guess I might see how I can do some work in XD lol

@Jeron actually I do large format posters, shirt designs and print in XD. (that's how much I like the experience better) - you just have to create canvases at that pixel dimension, or, just export at 4x, or copy paste as the end step into Ai. It's surprisingly capable.

When I say Ai is dead, it's more from a perspective of directly and indirectly trying to get these kinds of updates since 2010. I've accepted that it's probably more likely to be reborn than re-engineered.

Keep in mind. I'm a huge illustrator fan. I probably wasn't clear if you thought I disagreed with you. I agree totally. I've just been waiting for longer than a decade. I came up with the idea of Ai being dead about 6 years ago and it just helped me have peace with it rather than get all frustrated. They have yet to prove me wrong.

And yes. I'll be the biggest celebrator when they merge Figma and XD (And Framer).

If only I could us Ipad to design and prepare for print 200 linear meters of wall print that I am keeping In one illustrator file for alignment and task automation purpose. I would do this from my living room and feel the same way as people on cool Adobe adverts. In reality I need mouse and keyboard and large scree as well as (sometimes) 64GB of ram.

TOP tips for any one working with rasters in illustrator

Check if your GPU Acceleration is on as this still keep glitching after using outline preview. If it is off > save file> switch off illustrator> switch on > continue work

I also find that if I link raster file sometimes is lagging but if I embedded it it works better.

I am not surprised why design agency keep sending us Photoshop files at full size but only 75ppi for large format print.

@Jayse That doesn't really shine light on the core issue. I get that XD is replacing UI/UX work in Illustrator but explain to me how XD is replacing things in industries like Screen Printing, Large Format, and various others? XD is a specialized app that Adobe has and is not what I would use to ever create something like a shirt design or a poster. The software is not dead, though it may be dying due to people moving to other software, and the fact still stands that they need to fix core performance. I love that companies like Affinity are putting pressure on Adobe and making some great software. Also adobe bought Figma so I imagine that will be absorbed into XD.

Also I have nothing against a Tablet version but if I have a powerful computer then there should be no reason that I shouldn't be able run a more powerful version of the app on it so that it takes advantage of the hardware. The issue is that multi-core computers have been around for decades so this should not still be "Under Review"

Illustrator is dead. For the most part.

One day, it will be replaced by what they're slowly rebuilding from scratch on iPad. (Borrowing from the excellent XD app.)

Years ago, I watched them recreate After Effects for performance from the ground up, and that was years of hot mess. Users were furious. To avoid that, it appears that they're basically redoing the apps to be web/iPad apps, which is smart and future forward. They've been super slow with it tho, probably because of lack of competition. (just buy Figma or Freehand etc. if something competitive shows up)

But hopefully that shines some light on what they're likely doing in this domain. For speedier, more pleasant experience of Ai, try the iPad version, XD and or the competitors.

Ai used to be my daily driver for 10 hour days, now, I do the same work, but Ai is not even a shortcut in my dock. 🤷‍♂️ (99% replaced by XD).