New 2012 MacBook Air running Photoshop and Logic Pro

[aRollingStone]

Looking to buy a laptop. The most I do with my current iMac is record music using logic pro, edit video in iMovie and edit photos in photoshop.

I'm planning on travelling for a decent length of time and would like to continue to do this on a laptop.

The weight and SSD of the macbook air are really appealing to me. I'm wondering if it will be able to perform the above tasks? I read some reviews of people using photoshop on a 2011 macbook air with no issues, and from what I understand, the cheapest 2012 macbook air 13' is faster then the ultimate macbook air of 2011?

So I'm considering purchasing a 2012 MacBook air 13' with the 1.8GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 and upgrading the RAM from 4gb to 8gb.

Will this be able to meet my needs? I say I will be editing photos and recording music with it, but I'm still really amateur and I'm sure my needs are also.

 

[aRollingStone]

I know a macbook pro would perform faster, but I read the geekbench benchmarks and it's so abstract. Even if one is 20% faster? Does that translate to the MBA taking an extra 12 seconds per minute than the MBP? A couple of seconds doesn't bother me much.

 

[sacricide]

From what I've read performance is decent . And only a jump to a quad core would be the only serious next step for production. The amount of threads in the CPU seems to be the biggest factor. Including hdd speeds. So quad-core , ssd. But I had to choose between an air vs a dual core pro. Air is good enough for me

 

[aRollingStone]

Thanks

Anyone else?

 

[thechris.prince]

Looking to buy a laptop. The most I do with my current iMac is record music using logic pro, edit video in iMovie and edit photos in photoshop.

I'm planning on travelling for a decent length of time and would like to continue to do this on a laptop.

The weight and SSD of the macbook air are really appealing to me. I'm wondering if it will be able to perform the above tasks? I read some reviews of people using photoshop on a 2011 macbook air with no issues, and from what I understand, the cheapest 2012 macbook air 13' is faster then the ultimate macbook air of 2011?

So I'm considering purchasing a 2012 MacBook air 13' with the 1.8GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 and upgrading the RAM from 4gb to 8gb.

Will this be able to meet my needs? I say I will be editing photos and recording music with it, but I'm still really amateur and I'm sure my needs are also.

I just got the new 13" i5 256 SSD 8GB and I can say that this thing flies. I was able to launch CS4 with a 22MB photo and it took less than 5 seconds to open! Adding filters is super quick and even zooming in and out on said photo is really fluid. As far as iMovie, I haven't done too much yet. But I can tell you that it imported 15GB from iPhoto to render the thumbnails in less than 7 Minutes! Scrubbing through all my videos is silky smooth. It's def not a pro machine, but unless you make a living from editing RAW files and HD video, I think you'll find it extremely capable to the task. And she won't keep you waiting too long either.