Spotted by Wccftech, this behavior is interesting because the image editing software is so CPU-intensive that anyone would assume it needed the performance cores to run. This was certainly the case for the M3 MacBook Air, which Yuryev shows using all four performance and all four efficiency cores to get the work done.

The smaller Air is the perfect student laptop, but once you're out of school you should graduate to the larger but still highly portable 15-inch model.