2013 MBA vs rMBP 13 for photography?

OreoCookie said:

If you get any type of external storage solution, you basically cripple portability and chain your machine to the desk where your external harddrives are located. Even if they are (more) portable 2.5" drives, I'd really give up that dream,

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With the new Lightroom 5, this is solved with the Smart Preview function. I am now able to edit RAW photos while the originals sit at home. AWESOMENESS!!!!!

That being said, I too am also in search of a laptop for photo editing. I'm typing this on the new MBA at the moment. I do have a late 2011 15" 2.4 i7 cMBP loaded with a SSD, HDD, and 16gb ram. It runs like a beast. I just don't use it in the field as much because it weighs a lot, it's size is larger, and battery life isn't as good. At the time it was, but now in 2013, we have option that Apple wants to share with us to make our lives "want/ need" these new machines. So I bought the new MBA i5, 8gb ram, with 512 flash. Yes, I splurged for the 512.... i just did ok.

Performance of my new MBA: Lightroom runs great! All the sliders adjust in real time with no hiccups. The issue is photoshop (i use CS5). The brush tools cause my display to flicker severely, rendering my editing process useless. I'm hoping Apple or Adobe fix this before my 14 days are up (it's already been 7). The screen ok for culling, but as a previous poster mentioned, colors aren't accurate at all. Everything else runs great on the machine. The fan hardly ever turns on during photo editing, unless maybe a heavy batch conversion in LR or gaming (which it does when I run WoW). Other than Photoshop, I'd keep it, but at this point after shelling out 2k+ (Applecare), I want a machine that is solid! SO I will be waiting for the rMBP in hopes it''ll work with photoshop better.

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For all that will post "did you contact apple or adobe." Yes I did and also some links to follow:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/5454363#5454363 (CS6)
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1602252/
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5111828?start=0&tstart=0
http://forums.adobe.com/message/5451214

OreoCookie said:

No, ChrisA is approximately correct, approximately, because the probability is higher than twice the probability of failure of a single hard drive.

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The question is not how likely the drive is to die (we know it will) but, rather, when it will die. A RAID won't die twice as quickly as a single drive.

KeithPratt said:

The question is not how likely the drive is to die (we know it will) but, rather, when it will die. A RAID won't die twice as quickly as a single drive.

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You're mistaking »twice as likely« with »twice as quickly«. Our arguments are mathematically correct, but we make statements about the likelihood of failure in a give (same) time period. Since RAIDs have other single points of failure (RAID software/RAID controller, a single power supply, etc.), the probability of failure in a given time period is actually more than twice as likely.

OreoCookie said:

You're mistaking »twice as likely« with »twice as quickly«.

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I appreciate the difference. I'm just trying to point out a common misconception...

OreoCookie said:

Since RAIDs have other single points of failure (RAID software/RAID controller, a single power supply, etc.), the probability of failure in a given time period is actually more than twice as likely.

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Twice as likely as what? The difference in failure rate between two independent drives and two drives in RAID0 is purely down to the RAID hardware/software.

There seems to be a common misconception that the act of putting two drives in RAID0 doubles the probability of failure; where the same person wouldn't consider splitting their files over two drives (rather than one big one) doubling the probability of failure.

KeithPratt said:

Twice as likely as what? The difference in failure rate between two independent drives and two drives in RAID0 is purely down to the RAID hardware/software.

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We're talking about the failure of volumes rather than hard drives.

KeithPratt said:

There seems to be a common misconception that the act of putting two drives in RAID0 doubles the probability of failure; where the same person wouldn't consider splitting their files over two drives (rather than one big one) doubling the probability of failure.

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That's exactly what RAID0 (striping) does: it distributes files across two drives, thus (more than) doubling the probability of failure because it suffices that one drive fails to lose all data. If you have two independent volumes on two drives, you'd only lose half the data. It's not a misconception, it's a factually correct statement.

Do photos on the retina screen look so bad as someone mentioned here?

MajkJaro said:

Do photos on the retina screen look so bad as someone mentioned here?

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No, not at all. I've had my rMBP for about a month now, and if anything, my images look better on the retina display than they did on my non-retina MBP.