I found the air with 8 gigs of ram and the i7 processor at the Apple store refurb department and went ahead and purchased it.
#Using external hard drive for macbook air and film editing pro#
Once I decided that I didn't need the screen of the pro and that they performed pretty close to the same the decision was easy. I really didn't see any difference in my non scientific test.
While I had the machines next to each other I tried opening some apps, restarting, and other tasks to see how they performed next to each other. I could see though that if I did color critical work the pro screen would be the way to go. Honestly the Air screen was working just fine and I could see that for my purposes the pro screen wasn't necessary. I edited a few photos on both machines while I was there to see how each screen would feel to me. It also seemed to have a wider color gamut and dynamic range. The viewing angles were better and you could see more detail. The screen on the pro was clearly better. I opened up iPhoto and booted up the exact same photo on each. There seemed to be no consensus between the i7 and the i5 processor in terms of getting a performance bump so I wasn't sure which on the air laptop would be a better deal?Īnyway, I went to the local apple store and put the two machines side by side. After doing a bunch of research I decided that if I'd go with the air I'd have to max out the ram at 8 gigs.
I was also worried that I'd be disappointed with the screen compared to the new retina screen on the pro. I was worried that I wouldn't see much of a performance boost with the air. I agonized over whether or not to get the new pro or air. My previous machine was a core 2 duo macbook pro with 8 gigs of ram and a standard spinning hard drive. Just wanted to give my feedback on using the Macbook Air for photo editing.