MB Air or MB Pro?

[John Chardine]

A burglary at the house has forced the impending purchase of a new Macbook. I will go 13" but am having trouble deciding between the Air and Pro. I love everything about the Air except that the new models come with, and max out at, 4gb of RAM. I would put 8gb in the Pro if I got one. Another detail is that this will not be my primary processing machine but I will be running Photo Mechanic and Photoshop on it. Anyhow, will 4gb be enough for say processing full resolution image? And by enough I mean sufficiently fast. My hunch is that with the solid state hard drive even if Photoshop pages out on a large image it will be fast, therefore don't worry about the 4gb RAM ceiling.

Comments welcome and appreciated.

[Doug Brown]

I've got the new 13" i7. You should have no problem with Photoshop. 8 GB of RAM would definitely be nice, but 4 GB does just fine. If you're concerned about RAM, pick up a utility at the Mac App Store such as iCleanMemory. The Air is a great computer!

[John Chardine]

Thanks Doug. Good to know that the Air works for a pro like yourself.

[Roger Clark]

John,
Do both have enough disk space? I like smaller and lighter laptops for travel, but would like them with 1GB+ in disk, which you can't seem to get.

Roger

[Doug Brown]

There are plenty of 1 TB portable external drives if you need that much space. I normally use the Air to backup image files when I'm in the field, and then I delete them from the Air after I transer the images to my desktop.

[John Chardine]

It's a good point Roger. The old Macbook that was swiped had 500gb and always had surplus space of about 250gb. The surplus is enough for about 13,000 1DIV RAW images so I never had a problem even for long trips (6 weeks) in Antarctica. With 250gb of solid state memory in the Air that would probably leave 100+ gb of surplus = 5000 + images, which either would not be enough or would keep me honest in terms of dumping as I go! The alternative would be to take a 1TB mini external drive for overflow but I'd then have to have another one for Time Machine backups. It will be very nice when the small Thunderbolt drives start coming out. They will be super fast.

Thanks Doug- I was typing this message when yours came in, so I guess we are thinking along the same lines!

[Roger Clark]

The other thing to consider in new computers is USB3. I'm getting read and write speeds of about 96 MBytes /second with USB3 interface to and from USB 3 (2 and 3 TByte) drives. The thunderbolt read/write tests I've seen online were around 115 MBytes/sec, so a little better. But USB 3 drives are now common. On USB 2, I get about 32 MBytes/second on I7 linux machines and about 25 MB/sec. on windows xp. So USB 3 is a big step up. Thunderbolt a small step up from usb3, although (I hope) that will improve further.

Roger

[Jamie Strickland]

I just went through the same thing, I got the macbook pro upgraded to 8GB of ram, installed a SSD, took out the optical drive to put a 2nd HD in there for storage and am very happy.

thunderbolt is twice as fast as USB3 and there are already external raids doing real life 600MBs which USB3 cannot do, it will be nice when they come down in price though :)

MAC doesn't have USB3 though, regardless you will never be able to use USB3 or thunderbolts power without SSD or disk arrays anyway because a regular HD is nowhere near fast enough and is the bottleneck, I would say the average USB3 external disk is twice as fast as a USB2 one though. I have firewire 800 and its no better it maxes out at 100MBs in theory but in reality its only giving 80-90MBs anyway.

[Jamie Strickland]

btw if your looking at getting a mac checkout this it expires tomorrow I think and is the best deal I have ever seen on macs http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3178897

[John Chardine]

The other thing to consider in new computers is USB3. I'm getting read and write speeds of about 96 MBytes /second with USB3 interface to and from USB 3 (2 and 3 TByte) drives. The thunderbolt read/write tests I've seen online were around 115 MBytes/sec, so a little better. But USB 3 drives are now common. On USB 2, I get about 32 MBytes/second on I7 linux machines and about 25 MB/sec. on windows xp. So USB 3 is a big step up. Thunderbolt a small step up from usb3, although (I hope) that will improve further.

Roger

For what it's worth, this is what Apple shows for comparative speed.

[Doug Brown]

Here's a short video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwBog9AZqK4) I just made showing the MacBook Air 13" i7 processing an image file in Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5. The image is a 1D Mark IV RAW file. Even with LR 3 and CS5 running, memory usage never exceeded 2.5 GB. This is the first time I've created a movie and uploaded it to YouTube. Hopefully I didn't screw up!

I'm including the processed file in case anyone wants to see the finished result.

98220

[Doug Brown]

One more thing. I'm fairly certain we'll be seeing USB 3 to Thunderbolt adapters in the coming months, so you'll be able to use those USB 3 external drives with the Air if you want.

[Jamie Strickland]

the only problem with the adapters is that the display port shares the thunderbolt port so if you also want to use an external monitor it won't be possible to do both at the same time... unless you buy the new MAC thunderbolt monitors which is what I am going to do that 27" one is gorgeous

[John Chardine]

Hi Jamie- But Thunderbolt is daisy-chainable to an ultimate degree so why not run a USB3 adapter off the TB port of the monitor?

[Jamie Strickland]

yeah thats my point you can only do that if you have that mac monitor which most people probably won't have : )

[John Chardine]

Understand!

[John Chardine]

Many thanks for posting the video Doug (I'd like to know how to record these sorts of things myself- what did you use?).

I ended up with the MB Air and it's really excellent. It is very fast, which I think has to do with the solid-state disk drive. Also it runs very cool- none of this burning feeling if you use it on your lap. Incidentally, I was worried about having 250gb of solid-state disk space but I have loaded the machine up with what I want and still have 220gb left over which is enough for a 6 week trip away, for me anyway.

[Doug Brown]

Happy to help John. I just used QuickTime; it comes free with Lion. Just launch QuickTime and go to File -> New Screen Recording. There's even a built-in Share menu that allows you to publish the video to YouTube. Just for kicks I did do a little editing in iMovie, which I'd never used before. Enjoy your new laptop!

[Don Nelson]

Apple usually (but not for CPU/GFX - Sandybridge) buys components from two suppliers.
There is a substantial difference in performance depending upon which SSD you got included in your MCBA. (Samsung being the preferred SSD over the Toshiba)
And there is also some difference between the display supplied by LG Phillips (which isn't as bright but has better blacks and better color rendition) over the Samsung display.


Also, there is a substantial improvement in performance for the upgrade to the 1.8GHz i7 over the 1.7Ghz ( improvements in times for CS4 and Adobe RAW imports. It was a recommended upgrade by the writer(s) of this report.

The benchmarks were done by Anandtech (respected across the industry for unbiased reporting) and you can read this here: (and it tells you how to find out which SSD and which display you have)

The SSD results are unexpected -- usually Apple does a good job matching component suppliers. ACCORDING TO THE RESULTS IN THE ANANDTECH REVIEW --YOUR MACBOOK AIR MAY BE FASTER (or SLOWER) THAN THE "SAME" VERSION THE PERSON NEXT TO YOU IS USING.

(and for those viewing Anandtech for the first time - they do mulitpage reviews.....look for the blue next page link towards the bottom, just above comments (which are the same for all pages)
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4528/the-2011-macbook-air-11-13inch-review/2
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4554/apples-11inch-macbook-air-core-i7-18ghz-review-update

And one of the results for the 11/13 inch MCBA was that if you are upgrading from the MacbookPro (2010 version pre-Sandybridge), you won't see any performance degredation by going to the 1.8GHz MCBA(2011 SNB version).

Also notable - they've fixed the Boot Camp so you don't need a CD/DVD drive -- can now be loaded on a USB memory stick (suggest 8GB even though it might fit onto a 4GB stick). So you can do Boot Camp off a USB thumb drive. (for those applications that don't run natively on Apple -- I have quite a few)

[Sabyasachi Patra]

I am never comfortable with small screens. I am evaluating the 17 inch Macbook Pro. One of the reason is the increased need for video editing. For editing still images, the Air should be fine.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[John Chardine]

Interesting info Don. I ended up with the high-end i5 processor, the Phillips screen and Samsung SSD.

Regarding the processing, Activity monitor shows 4 readouts, yet the processor is only dual core. Do you know why the readout is this way (something about 4 "threads?").

[Doug Brown]

<embed id="application/x-exifeverywhere" type="application/x-exifeverywhere" width="0" height="0">Each core can run two threads in the new MBA. The Samsung SSD that you got is the one you want; much faster read/write.

[Don Nelson]

Interesting info Don. I ended up with the high-end i5 processor, the Phillips screen and Samsung SSD.

Regarding the processing, Activity monitor shows 4 readouts, yet the processor is only dual core. Do you know why the readout is this way (something about 4 "threads?").

Its called Hyper-threading. Its not always turned on for all processors, but is for the high end SNB parts. Single core uses the resources to effectively run the equivalent of about ~1.8 cores (second thread gets resources unused at any instant by the first thread). Very effective means of using the resources. Very effective with software that can be multi-threaded - an obvious one that most of us use is Photoshop(tm).

[John Chardine]

Thanks Don. Amazing how the technology is on the up all the time.