Apple / Parallels buying advice

Hey John. The new M1s are fast, and the battery life is incredible.

Overall, Storyline 360 and Storyline 3 run well on the M1 with Parallels. However, there's one performance issue with Storyline 360 that you should know about.

As you know, we recently updated the triggers panel in Storyline 360 to include visual and functional enhancements. The updated trigger panels and workflow work flawlessly on Intel-based Macs. Unfortunately, a performance issue with the M1 Macs affects performance when using triggers. 

For example, creating a new trigger can take up to 30 seconds for the wizard to appear. Our devs are looking into the performance issues, but you might want to hold off for now if you're buying an M1 to work in Storyline. Everything else works as expected, but adding and editing triggers is sluggish.

Personally, I'd stick with an Intel-based machine if you can. I'm still working on my 2019 MBP 16" and figure I can easily get another year or more from it.

Hopefully some other M1 users will chime in and share their experiences.

David,

Storyline 360 and Storyline 3 do NOT run "well" on M1 with Parallels. There have been reports of performance with Storyline and M1 with what you reported and other issues including crashing. Therefore, you cannot say it works "well". Does 30 seconds creating a trigger fall into the category of "well"? There is a way to run Storyline on M1 but if you read the details and follow every subsequent instruction from Windows (see link below), technically it is not a fully supported production environment. And that is the catch. We are a business and need the stability of a production environment. I have no issue with the rest of your post but it is not accurate to say it works "well". Someone may read this and say, hey great, I am going to plunk down thousands of dollars on my Apple M1 because Storyline work "well" with an M1. It does not and the Windows ARM/Apple may never be resolved. I would highly recommend you share this Articulate post regarding the issue when you discuss the M1 and Storyline with the community.

John,

See here for another thread on running Storyline 360.

Hey Patrick.

Thanks for including the support article, Is Articulate 360 compatible with the Apple M1 chip?

You're correct that there are issues with Storyline 360 and the M1 chips. We currently support only Intel-based Macs running Windows in virtual environments, not the M1 chips. 

Hi David, please let me know if your engineers are working on this and what they may have to say about progress.

Hi Patrick,

No update just yet but we'll be sure to post on this discussion with our progress. Please let me know if you need assistance with something in the meantime. Thanks for checking in!

I wanted to point out a significant problem related to triggers and the M1. It takes me 10-15 seconds to create a new trigger--a super basic one, not one with lots of frills. My workaround has been to copy and paste triggers because editing them in the panel works at regular speed. However I've just discovered that when you do this it somehow negates keyboard accessibility. If you copy and paste a trigger on a button, it will no longer activate when the user presses the enter key. So in the course I just finished, I now how to go back and create hundreds of new triggers to replace the triggers I had just so that the triggers work on a keyboard and will pass 508 compliance. See this post for more on the copied trigger problem.

Hi everyone,

I have some great news to share! We just released another update for Storyline 360. In Update 77, we've included important fixes and new features.

One of the bugs we've fixed is: 

• The trigger wizard performs faster on M-series Macs.

Launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer to take advantage of this update, and click the Update button next to Storyline 360. You'll find our step-by-step instructions here.

Please let me know if you need additional help!

Any update from community users as to their experience?

Tim Slade has a good YouTube video out that you might find useful. (Thanks Tim ;-)