Originally posted by junototoro Is Macbook Air good enough for Photoshop/Lightroom or not?
The only issue you'll run into with the MacBook Air is RAM. The October 2011 model I own is a dual core 1.8Ghz i7. This is the mobile low power version, and 1.8Ghz is "nominal speed"; it will increase clock speed on demand up to 2.6Ghz in multi-core operation, and 2.9Ghz in single-core operation. Oh, this *will* make the fans kick on... just a warning
Because of the high-speed SSD, the Photoshop performance (and actually, the total performance "feel" of the machine itself) is MUCH faster than you'd expect considering the numbers. With most high-res images and memory constrained machines (mac or windows), the photoshop performance limiter is the speed of the scratch disk. In this case, it's MUCH FASTER than any spinning drive available. In sequences that require photoshop to hit the scratch disk, my "1.8Ghz" Macbook Air was FASTER than my "2.8Ghz" Macbook Pro, even though the Macbook pro had 8Gb of RAM and 2.8Ghz processors. Then I put an SSD in the Macbook Pro, and it's faster - but only about 10-12% faster. There's virtually no difference in Lightroom performance between ANY of my three macs: A 2011 Macbook Air, an early 2011 Macbook Pro, and my ca 2008 quad core 3Ghz (Xeon) Mac Pro with 16GB RAM. The Mac Pro still stomps the other two in Photoshop performance, however.
There's about 8% difference between the Macbook Air i7(1.8Ghz) and the Macbook Air i5 (1.6/1.7Ghz).
I find it amusing when I meet people with Toshibas made 3 years ago who suggest that my Macbook air doesn't have the "oomph" necessary to run Photoshop or Lightroom (or other processor) - since the 2011 Macbook Air will outperform nearly every laptop available at that time, including several machines purchased by friends in 2011. Computer performance is ALWAYS mercurial. If you sit down at any two year old laptop and find its performance acceptable, then the new Macbook Air will probably exceed your requirements.
It's worth noting that the current MBA uses Intel's integrated graphics solution. If you play 3d games a lot, this might matter. I've found absolutely no difference in use performance Lightroom between my Mac Pro (ATI HD 5880) and my MBA (GMA3000 or something). Both are lighting fast. The 'abysmal' performance of Intel's integrated video solution is only 'abysmal' compared to much more expensive current discrete chips. It's comparable, again, to last year's nvidia integrated solution, just not *this year's*
You're already looking at Macs, so I won't belabor you with the discussion of the superiority of the MBA display or the Unix-based Mac OSX operating system
And, it runs Windows 7 like mad, too