MacBook Air for Image Editing?

With a measly HD 4000 for graphics, it may only be able to handle Lightroom and Aperture. Using Photoshop may have some lag. Also, such heavy processing will drain the battery very quickly.
I thin for the price of the MBA you mentioned, it might me much more worth it to get the 2012 15" Unibody MacBook Pro (without Retina Display but with hi-res glossy/matte instead). With a dedicated GPU, much beefier CPU and a bigger, better screen, it'll serve your needs a lot better.
My Early 2011 15" can take on anything that I throw at it. Literally anything.

the HD 4000 graphics arent that bad actually... according to benchmarks, it's on par with the dedicated Nvidia geforce 330M built into my 2010 15" Macbook Pro. granted, my mbp is 2 years old, it still holds up very well as fast as photo and video editing goes.

The new line of mbps with the updated graphics will of course blow the hd 4000 away, but I'm thinking of trading my 2010 15" for an Air and I think I'd get at least equal performance, if not better with the new cpu chips.

the only thing to consider is if you can handle the smaller screen size, personally I think I'd adjust to it quickly and find a good workflow (prob be utilizing the full screen mode with lion a lot)

I'm currently considering this myself. I have the early 2011 15" MBP with 256GB SSD/8GB and HR-AG screen. It's just a bit too big to easily use anywhere but my desk and if I'm shooting tethered it's a beast to lug around the place.... Ok it's not that bad, but it's hugely heavier than an air!

I'd have thought the dual-core i7/8GB/256GB would be enough for me, my concern is the screen. The current 1680x1050 is lovely and big enough for LR & PS and the odd bit of video editing. The Air is 1440x900 so not a huge step in the wrong direction, and pixel density terms is identical, so all I'm loosing is 2" of real estate.

I can probably sell the MBP for somewhere near what a high end air would be so pocket wise I'm ok. I'd just like to speak to someone that uses an Air for this sort of thing. Also heat wise - I know when I'm doing heavier stuff in PS the fans go mental in the MBP, do the Air's do the same?

Another option might be the 13" rmbp that is rumored to be coming out in October, particularly if it were offered with 16 RAM.

Dornblaser said:

Another option might be the 13" rmbp that is rumored to be coming out in October, particularly if it were offered with 16 RAM.

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Does rumors say this 13" RMBP to have a dedicated graphics card? That would be awesome.

No, current rumors are for an integrated graphics card.

FTRG8R said:

The new MBP Retina looks great, but it's very pricey. The new MB Air 2.0/8GB/512MB looks attractive, but I'm wondering if it will have the horsepower to do digital imaging.

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It's fine, I've got the same one. Aperture screams on it. I just opened a 1.5GB layered PSD in CS6 and it was perfectly responsive. Took about 3GB in memory. All the tools and stuff I tried quickly worked well.