Neo vs. M1 MBA — Photo Scanning & Light Editing

[amphibious]

I have a few thousand things that need to be scanned and lightly edited. (These are rare/aged things of a large variety of materials and thicknesses. They cannot be scanned with a document scanner, flat bed only)

Right now I am scanning them at 2400dpi in the new version of Affinity on a 2019 MBP (2.6GHz, 6-core i7, 16GB), in batches of 8-10. By that I mean...

1. Scanning 8-10 things
2. Cropping them all
3. Copy/paste a brightness/contrast layer and a grouped layer consisting of multiple text boxes
4. Save as an Affinity file (~1.5gb)
5. Export as a JPG (~800mb)
6. Close them all
7. Go back to step 1

Any more than 8-10 open scans and my system gets laggy and unstable. Each scan takes approximately 5 minutes. At the end of each scanning session all the files are moved to a cloud-synced triple redundant NAS.

I was going to buy ~5 MBA M1s (8-core CPU, 7-core GPU, 8GB) to do this more efficiently, but when the rumors about the lower end machine started getting more serious I decided to wait until the announcement. Now it's here and I still can't really decide which to go with.

The Geekbench scores for the MBA M1 (2347/8342) and the iPhone 16 Pro (3445/8624) are quite comparable, but obviously iOS performance and macOS performance for the same chip will be different.

One thing I know for certain is that I greatly prefer a black keyboard and MagSafe, but saving time is way more important.

Any thoughts and/or speculation would be appreciated!

 

[FreakinEurekan]

You won't get MagSafe with either M1 MBA or with Neo, so that's not an issue.

For that specific task, I don't see any particular benefit of M1 MBA or Neo. Whatever floats your boat.

 

[bradman83]

CPU is not going to be your limiting factor here, RAM is. Assuming that's not a typo and you're scanning things at 2400 DPI (which seems right given the file sizes), having more than a handful open is going to fill your memory up incredibly fast. Stepping down from 16 to 8 GB will only make it worse.