One week with the MBA 11inch, a photographer's perspective

[Obsidiank]

So a week in and I've started to do some serious work on this machine. It's hooked up to my ACD. Some of you have asked whether the machine can handle the task of Lightroom and Photoshop with only 4GB of ram.

My initial impression was that the MBA totally kicked my MBP butt, especially when it came to lightroom export test and opening files. After a week, I can tell you that the MBA still kicks my MBP butt doing those things. However, I have one problem. The MBA air completely dies during rendering. Edited 10 photos at once and sent them to Photoshop to do a collage...yeah, that ate up pretty much all the ram and the machine started choking.

I might have to get that mac mini as a primary machine like I thought. Still love my air, kinda sad that it's choking.

 

[alecgold]

So a week in and I've started to do some serious work on this machine. It's hooked up to my ACD. Some of you have asked whether the machine can handle the task of Lightroom and Photoshop with only 4GB of ram.

My initial impression was that the MBA totally kicked my MBP butt, especially when it came to lightroom export test and opening files. After a week, I can tell you that the MBA still kicks my MBP butt doing those things. However, I have one problem. The MBA air completely dies during rendering. Edited 10 photos at once and sent them to Photoshop to do a collage...yeah, that ate up pretty much all the ram and the machine started choking.

I might have to get that mac mini as a primary machine like I thought. Still love my air, kinda sad that it's choking.

I dont use Lightroom or photoshop, but I noticed that when I'm OCD-ing one huge PDF file in acrobat pro the memory gets down really fast. But when I OCD it without opening it the memory is hardly used.
So it might be the way the memory is used between LR and PS that is causing this behaviour?!

Did you get the i7 11"?