Apple Silicon M1 processor support | Acrobat and Acrobat Reader

Last updated on Apr 19, 2023

Run Acrobat and Acrobat Reader faster in native mode on Apple computers using the Apple Silicon M1 processor.

With the September 2021 release, you can run Acrobat and Acrobat Reader (version 21.007.20091) natively on Apple computers with Silicon M1 processor with 1.5X the speed of Rosetta emulation mode.

Does Acrobat natively support Apple Silicon devices?

Acrobat and Acrobat Reader support Apple devices with Apple Silicon M1 processors. You can now choose to run Acrobat and Acrobat Reader in either native Apple Silicon mode or the Rosetta emulation mode.

Note:

Classic versions of Acrobat - Acrobat Pro 2017 and Acrobat Pro 2020 currently do not support native mode.

What is native mode on macOS?

Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader can now run directly on the new ARM architecture of Apple Silicon computers without any intermediary translations. This state of the application is referred to as the native mode.

How to enable Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader to run in native mode?

To use the native Apple Silicon mode, do the following:

Go to Acrobat > Preferences.
On the left pane, choose General, and then select Enable native OS mode for optimal performance in the Application Startup section.
Click OK. Quit Acrobat or Acrobat Reader, and then relaunch the app.

Known limitations

Acrobat and Acrobat Reader have minor feature differences when running in the native and the Rosetta emulation modes. For example, the Twain-based scanners and the legacy third-party (Intel-only) plug-ins are incompatible when Acrobat runs in native mode. You must run Acrobat in Rosetta emulation mode to use these features.

Issues

Twain-based scanners are incompatible with the Apple Silicon native mode.
Existing third-party plug-ins are incompatible with the Apple Silicon native mode.
Serial number deployments won't work with the Apple Silicon native mode.
Catalogs, Scan, HTML2PDF: Catalogs, Scan, WebCapture, and dependent features are incompatible with Apple Silicon native mode.
Find: Find functionality still needs Rosetta to be fully functional. Only simple find is supported in native mode.

Workaround

Run Acrobat in Rosetta emulation mode by disabling the native Apple silicon mode preference. Go to Acrobat > Preferences > General and then deselect Enable native OS mode for optimal performance. To learn more about Rosetta, see About Rosetta.

Note:

Before running Acrobat in Rosetta emulated mode, ensure that Rosetta is already installed.

You can also install Rosetta explicitly using the steps below:

Open Spotlight by pressing the Command + Space bar key.
Type Terminal and press Return.
Copy and paste, or type the below command into the Terminal app and press Return.

softwareupdate --install-rosetta

plist to run Acrobat in Rosetta emulation mode

~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro.plist/AcrobatRunInNativeModeDC
AcrobatRunInNativeModeDC : NO

Adobe

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