New Mac Airbooks Ram

[thewanderer]

My macbook from 08 is wearing down, battery is dead always, wont charge, keys are jumping, spacebar is not doing quite right, just a bunch of repairs, the battery is 100-135 to replce, repairing keys and strokes, will probly be couple hundred, so i am thinking of moving on to the new airbook..

I would prefer the 11 inch due to light ness and size, as i travel a lot by car and air.  I am not much of a heavy lightroom user, I prefer photomechanic to browse and then just edit the very few that i like anymore, heck, i still use cs2.   

To the point,

With these new speeds on the current offerings, would 2 gb of ram be sufficient?  or would I be better off going to the 4 gb of either the 13 or 11 inch, or further still, the 13 mac book pro.  it comes wit 4gb but not the same disk storage.  I dont really understaind all the benchmarks and speeds etc but dont want to go short on the 2gb if its not going to properly run the lightroom or the CS. 

Im guessing my priority is whether the 2 gb is sufficent to run CS and LR given the new capabilities of these new machines, if not, I guess i will have to take the bite on the 4gb.

SIncerely

the wanderer

[Ken Bennett]

I can't imagine that you would be happy with 2GB of RAM. 4 gigs would be the least I'd want to run Photo Mechanic and Lightroom. I have 8 GB on both of my machines (a 27 inch iMac and a 17 inch MBP) and they bog down a bit with many large files in both apps.

The Macbook Air 11 inch is a nice little machine, and surprisingly quick for most tasks *except* processor-intensive stuff like developing a lot of raw files. The solid state hard drive makes any disk-intensive work, like launching applications, or going thru a lot of pix in PM, very snappy. One major downside is the small disk space, even 128GB would not leave a lot of room once you've loaded the OS and everything else a photographer wants on a laptop. For a long shooting trip, I would not be able to download all my photos to the internal drive, meaning I would need an external USB (!) drive, negating any speed advantage of the SSD.

But for a basic light-duty road machine, with some Photo Mechanic work and maybe light Lightroom, it should make a very nice computer.

The 13 inch Macbook Pro is a much more capable road machine. You can get a large hard drive, lots of RAM, and a decent processor (the 2.7gHz i7 comes nicely equipped, except for the slow 5400rpm drive.) The difference in size and weight over the Air is significant, though, and only you can decide what your highest priorities are.

[thewanderer]

So the simple answer is 4 gb on either machine minimum.  Large storage is.drawback on mba but speed is plus.  Mbp bigger phsyically and hd wise. 

Thanks for the detail.  Kinda figured it that way but was kinda hoping these new processors and flash things would cpmpensate.

Again, thanks

[jonathanlung]

I've got a 13" Macbook Air from 2009 (that replaced a 2008 model under the extended warranty); it's fine for me as an everyday machine, but the 2GBs of RAM is easily maxed out (a copy of Mail; Safari and Firefox opened to a basic page with no plugins, TextWrangler, and Activity Monitor will do that) and have to minimize the number of programs concurrently running to maintain any semblance of performance. When doing any graphics work, I usually quit everything but the program I need. Definitely go for the 4GBs. I would have, except, as you may know, that wasn't an option at the time.

[mediumcool]

… heck, i still use cs2.   

No Rosetta in new models running 10.7.

[budjames]

I have the new Macbook Air 13" i7 with 4GB ram and 256GB SSD. My previous laptop was a 2010 Macbook Pro i7 with 8GB ram and a 256GB OWC SSD that I installed myself.

I bought the Macbook Air in time for a 2 week European cruise vacation. I use Lightroom 3.5 for my DSLR work (Canon 1Ds MkIII and 5D MkII), iPhoto for the snapshots from a Panasonic P&S (Leica without the name plate) and iMovie for our compact digital video capture. Other than the slow saving of images in duplicate to a pair of OWC Mercury 500GB portable drives via the USB port (my MacBook Pro has firewire 800), the MBA performs surprisingly well. It's very fast even with running Lightroom and Parallels (running ACT! CRM and MS Outlook for work stuff) at the same time. And boy do I love the form factor, nice, light and very thin.

I calibrated the display with ColorMunki with no issues. The images look great!

Since getting back from vacation, I use my MBA in my home office connected to an Apple 27" LED display with the laptop display up too and it runs great. 4GB seems to work fine for all of the programs that I use: Parallels/Windows 7, Safari, MacOffice 2011,  Lightroom, iPhoto, Evernote, Devonthink Pro Office, OmniFocus and Mail. Many of these are running at the same time for most of the day.

I love it so much, that I gave my MBPro to my daughter to replace her 5 year old white MacBook. She is very happy with the upgrade!

OWC is supposed to be coming out with a Thunderbolt compatible portable drive. Once this is available, the MBA should become the tool of choice for the road warrior/photographer.

[JonathanRimmel]

4 GB is the absolute minimum these days for anything other than basic office work. I would highly recommend as much RAM as possible. Unfortunately this will cost you a pretty penny with Mac. I would also get a larger screen, 17 is a bit much (mobility wise) but 13 is a bit low. 15 is ideal.

[mediumcool]

The MacBook Air is available in only two screen sizes, 11" and 13".

[budjames]

I love how people who don't own Macs or other equipment can voice an opinion of what is the best equipment for the original poster.

I any case, Macbook Airs are flying off the shelves. I love my 13" and it runs all day running Parallels/Windows 7 for my work stuff on a 27" monitor with a few Mac programs open at the same time. It runs great.

For a road warrior photographer, I found the MBA awesome on my recent Trip to Europe running Lightroom to download, backup and do basic tagging and image editing in my idle moments.

My photography "workstation" is a MacPro 8-core with 32GB ram, SSD boot drive, 2 x 2 drive internal RAID 1 and two eSata 5-bay towers for video and photo editing, backups, etc., a total of 16TB of storage. This drives a 24" Eizo ColorEdge monitor calibrated monthly with ColorMunki.

If you're a serious Photoshop and/or Lightroom user, you need a powerful machine with lots of flexible, fast storage options. It make's life easier and speeds things up.

That said, the MBAir is still a great second Mac for all of the aforementioned reasons. One more thing. The unit doesn't weigh much more than my original iPad, so hauling it around Europe was not a problem and, the cool factor is very high!

Cheers.
Bud

[mediumcool]

I love how people who don't own Macs ... can voice an opinion of what is the best equipment for the original poster.

Bud

+1

[JonathanRimmel]

Oh, I missed part of the post. Well, I still say 13 inches just isn't enough. But if your heart is set on that specific model, it is the best you'll be able to do. But like others mentioned, you can always connect it to an external monitor, forgoing mobility of course.