Welcome to the era of the "Portable Photoshop."

Buy an iPad Pro (M1 or newer) and Affinity Photo 2. Leave the laptop at home. For Digital Artists: Buy a 14-inch MacBook Pro. Run the real Photoshop. It’s ready. For Budget Users: Use Photopea in a Chrome tab. You will be shocked at how far it has come.

While the iPad version initially launched with missing features (looking at you, pen pressure and layer groups), the 2024-2025 updates have finally bridged the gap. With the M2 and M4 chips, the iPad Pro can now handle 10,000x10,000 pixel canvases with dozens of layers without breaking a sweat.

The dream isn't just about running the software on a laptop anymore. It’s about in a package that fits in a backpack. But is the promise real, or are we still sacrificing too much power for portability? The Heavyweight Champion Goes Mobile First, let's address the elephant in the room: Adobe Photoshop itself. Adobe has aggressively pushed its cloud ecosystem, but the full-fat desktop version remains a resource hog. However, the game changed with the introduction of Photoshop on the iPad (and now, natively on Apple Silicon MacBooks).

The era of the desktop prison is over. Your canvas now fits in your backpack. The only thing holding you back is the size of your battery bank.

For two decades, "Photoshopping" an image has been synonymous with high-end, desktop-bound computing. The popular imagination of a graphic designer involves a massive dual-monitor setup, a tower humming with power, and a Wacom tablet the size of a small television. But what happens when you need to edit a high-res layer mask on a train, clone out a distraction at a coffee shop, or build a composite on a campsite?