Macbook Air or Macbook Pro?

[TostitoBandito]

If you love Macs and are already committed to that ecosystem, get a Mac. If you're open to getting the best price/performance (plus much better repairability), get any one of a number of Windows laptops instead. The "Macs are better for creatives" thing is a myth and always has been. It's more design/aesthetic preference, what their friends have, how much they know about technology, or wanting an Apple logo more than it is about what runs Photoshop or Resolve Studio or whatever better. With Apple in general you're usually paying around a 30-50% markup in terms of actual performance vs windows laptops of a comparable quality and form factor.

Also, unless you're getting a multi thousand dollar monster of a notebook you're already making large performance concessions compared to a desktop in the arena of photo/video processing. Laptops are useful for travel and downloading/previewing photos on trips, but I'd strongly encourage a more powerful desktop along with large high quality regularly-calibrated displays for home use where the real work happens. You could probably handle photos ok with something like a Macbook Pro (plus external monitors and storage), but any significant amount video processing and especially 4K+ or high frame rates is probably a non-starter.

 

[sea_ledford]

I recently replaced my older mac book pro (2018ish - intel based) with a newer one for editing 8K video. For photos or anything that an a6700 can output, an Air will be fine.

 

[MB NZ]

MacBook Pro. You want as much grunt for video editing as possible. They have the same dimensions more or less as a MacBook Air. Only downside is they are heavier.

 

[Umuntu]

If you love Macs and are already committed to that ecosystem, get a Mac. If you're open to getting the best price/performance (plus much better repairability), get any one of a number of Windows laptops instead. The "Macs are better for creatives" thing is a myth and always has been. It's more design/aesthetic preference, what their friends have, how much they know about technology, or wanting an Apple logo more than it is about what runs Photoshop or Resolve Studio or whatever better. With Apple in general you're usually paying around a 30-50% markup in terms of actual performance vs windows laptops of a comparable quality and form factor.

Also, unless you're getting a multi thousand dollar monster of a notebook you're already making large performance concessions compared to a desktop in the arena of photo/video processing. Laptops are useful for travel and downloading/previewing photos on trips, but I'd strongly encourage a more powerful desktop along with large high quality regularly-calibrated displays for home use where the real work happens. You could probably handle photos ok with something like a Macbook Pro (plus external monitors and storage), but any significant amount video processing and especially 4K+ or high frame rates is probably a non-starter.

Some of those historical price-performance comparisons have changed dramatically with Apple’s own silicon chips

 

[TostitoBandito]

Some of those historical price-performance comparisons gave changed dramatically with Apple’s own silicon chips

Yes, but it's extremely application dependent and many of those big improvements are only in some relatively narrow use cases. So you need to research the benchmarks to see what apps actually benefit from that performance and decide accordingly based on your usage.

For instance, modern macs often excel at Photoshop benchmarks, but get creamed by PC's in other similar applications. This is because Apple's chips can achieve better single threaded performance in that application, but as soon as you bring in anything that requires a lot of threads or GPU horsepower (such as video processing) it's gonna struggle compared to an Intel/AMD CPU system of the same price class.

 

[Cisco_Pug]

If my main focus is photo editing (literally i might shoot one or two 30 second videos out of 500 photos), can the air handle that? Or is the pro still worth it for that?

 

[TostitoBandito]

If my main focus is photo editing (literally i might shoot one or two 30 second videos out of 500 photos), can the air handle that? Or is the pro still worth it for that?

The air can probably manage most of that. It might be worth considering the pro though for other factors, like potentially a bigger/better display (depending on size choice) if you're not gonna be plugged into an external monitor.

 

[Miyaru]

What's wrong with Windows?

You can only answer that question once you have worked on a Mac.

If my main focus is photo editing (literally i might shoot one or two 30 second videos out of 500 photos), can the air handle that? Or is the pro still worth it for that?

Go for a MacbookPro. Video editing with DaVinci Resolve wasn't possible on the older Macbook Air but that might have changed on later models.

 

[wnissen]

I have a MacBook Pro which is awesome but with the new chips I think an Air would be great. The key is to get as much RAM as you can afford, I would think at least 16gbs or more.

16GiB is the minimum now across the Apple line.

OP, are you sure you need a laptop at all? Planning on taking it on trips? If that's the case I would definitely get the Air, more portable and definitely capable of doing occasional video.

As far as Windows vs. Mac, I maintain my parent's Windows machine because that's what they are used to. It's a nightmare. Microsoft is constantly changing basic stuff like the location of the Start Menu, the display drivers need updating but it needs to be a Dell-specific driver, there's so much bloatware on the machine when you first buy it, etc., etc.

The Mac is certainly not perfect, but there are huge quality of life benefits to buying an integrated machine where the hardware and software are developed by the same company. Yes, you will pay a little more for upgraded storage and peripherals. But the hardware and software is built to last in a way that Windows hardware tends not to be.

 

[ReadyDiverOne]

16GiB is the minimum now across the Apple line.

Lol I didn’t know that mine is a 2021 machine and I have 64gbs. It’s blazing.