I have the same problems on Apple Macbook Air M1; with very simple and light work files, when making any adjustment in typography or transforming any element, it freezes for a few seconds, but repeats itself in any adjustment that I make in the document. It is impossible to work properly.

After posting this thread, I have been contacted by Adobe “Illustrator Team” Members and they say that they have reconfigured AI for use of Apple Metal in place of OpenGL. To back up AI prefs, then throw them out. Start Illustrator, quit the app and then restart once again. This appears to have fixed all the crashing, freezes and slow downs. Used it all afternoon without problems.

I have a Apple MacBook Air M1 and I'm having constant crashes when using Illustrator (and even InDesign). It freezes and I have too restart the computer. I don't have this problem with Photoshop. Is there any issue with this two softwares?

Same here on an M1 MacBook Pro 16GB Ram 512GB SSD
This is unusable

I tried turning off the GPU mode in preferences and that helped a lot. The issue I'm facing now is that the interface between Adobe products and Finder is shaky at best. "com.apple.appkit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService" stops responding frequently when I open, save, and place objects.

Turning off GPU does indeed keep my M1 MBP from crashing and Illustrator does indeed function now. “Function”, it’s slow AF and there are some rather strange video crashes here and there. This is not a fix! It’s a bandaid work around so I can continue to use AI. Still inexcusable for a company like Adobe, but par for the course. I am training up on Affinity Designer, learning curve for sure. But holy cow! Is it fast and beautiful software, and it’s on $50!

Thanks Sam for the tip! What I heard about Cloud was probably not iCloud but Adobe Cloud then 😅

I switched Cloud mode and GPU mode off and that has worked for me. It may all the constant saving due to Cloud mode that causes the freezing.

Has anyone tried the GPU hack? And how does that work? So frustrated and feel that I am loosing a lot of cashflow due to this.

Illustrator needs forever to open, to save and to export! And from time to time it crashes the whole computer....

Please update your apps for M1 chip. My system freezes and crashes when running Illustrator, even the simplest of tasks like pressing "p" for pen tool will freeze app and I cannot close or reopen unless I completely shut off my Mac and restart it, losing all my saved work. As I am typing this illustrator has been frozen for 15 minutes because of this bs. I am tired of literally not being able to use my brand new laptop because of Adobe's software incompatibility issues.

The two possible fixes I have heard of:

Some people have been helped by turning off GPU support in the Illustrator settings.

A few people mentioned they had issues linked with iCloud, and that the computer worked better when iCloud was turned off.

Come on~! Update please, keep crashing~

make it native or find a temporary solution, its completely useless

MacBook Pro with the M1 Apple chipIllustrator keeps freezing and crashing.

Even a bandaid fix so that it is somewhat useable until the native app comes would be incredible

Make it native for M1 Apple Silicon, it’s currently unusable

I have the exact same problem, it always starts with illustrator and then my other apps crash as well... It is just super frustrating and unworkable

Me too. Affinity Designer was optimised for M1 on day one. This is embarrassing Adobe.

When i buy a brand new macbook almost solely for the purpose of illustrator and adobe software running so flawlessly on it.... i DO NOT expect illustrator to be crashing every 5 minutes even on the tiniest of files. i cannot get any work done, absolutely ridiculous. i will be cancelling my subscription very soon if this is not resolved.