One Macbook Pro to replace Surface Laptop and Desktop?

[kitenski]

Morning all,

I currently have a Surface Pro 6 with an i5-8250U, 256gb hard drive and 8gb memory. This is used for work, mostly the MS Office suite inc some fairly hefty Excel sheets. There is nothing wrong with it all, it's small and light and the battery can last a whole day with a little tweaking.

However I also have an aged non work desktop bought in 2014, 16gb memory, i7-3770 and a 3TB of disk where I store pictures and videos. This is used for photo and video editing, but since the kids have grown up I don't really do as much of this anymore. Most likely to be editing GoPro videos shot on holiday. The video card is an old AMD Radeon HD 7900 series. I cannot upgrade the card, I've tried and the PC doesn't boot, suspect down to power. The ancient version of Premiere I have doesn't support the GoPro plugin for the Max 360 camera.

I'm wondering if a 13" 16gb MacBook Pro would potentially replace both, with some kind of external hard drive plugged in (or my existing Proliant Microserver to be used for the large file storage). GoPro have an editor only for Mac at the moment to edit the 360 files and/or I'd buy Final Cut.

I've not owned a Mac for years, from the research I've done all my Office programs, Outlook, Word, Excel, OneNote etc will run just fine.

So I guess 2 questions.

1. Is my logic sound?
2. I think from all the reading that I need to hang on and wait for the current 13" MBP to have the keyboard upgraded, correct?

Thanks for any thoughts,

Greg

 

[CaptHook]

I am in a slightly similar boat having had a Surface Pro 5 and loving the form factor. The Surface belonged to an employer I just left so I had to turn it back in. I also have an older desktop that doesn’t get used much and a server that holds most of my data.

I just bought a MacBook Air thinking I could use it for working from home, personal usage like light video editing, and it will probably last longer than a Windows PC, especially one at a similar price range.

Why not get a MacBook Air which already has the upgraded keyboard, save some money and keep the desktop to use when you need to? You could always upgrade the video card and power supply if necessary but I suspect it will get little use from your described needs.

I was back and forth between the Air and the Pro and the 2020 upgrades in the Air along with the form factor and price swayed me. This is my first Mac and I haven’t tried editing video yet (light GoPro and drone footage), but I am liking it so far.

 

[kitenski]

cheers how are you finding the air performance and battery life? I think if I bought an Air now I'd regret it when the 13" Pro refresh happens.

 

[CaptHook]

I’ve only had it since Wednesday and only used it for web browsing and work (which is remoting into a virtual desktop so little load on the MacBook Air) but I have the i3 version and performance is very good so far. I do plan to test some light video and photo editing sometime this weekend to see how it does because I originally wanted the i5 version and there was a delay so I went with the i3 version that was in stock and ready to ship.

Battery life is about 5-6 hours on high brightness in a very bright room so it’s doing well.