Question before buying the Air

[appleofmyibook]

I’m hoping someone can help me because I can’t seem to find any information online. I work with large Keynote files - sometimes 3gb file sizes and use a lot of animations. Travelling a lot for work it makes my 15 inch Pro way too inconvenient and big. I don’t have any performance issues when using Keynote on it but was wondering if a MacBook Air would stutter? I don’t know if it uses the CPU or the GPU or both. Am I better off getting a 13 inch Pro?

 

[saulinpa]

How much memory is on your Pro? Base Air only has 8GB RAM. Should be fine with 16GB which is a build-to-order option.

 

[appleofmyibook]

My Pro is 16gb. So it’s to do with RAM above all else?

 

[saulinpa]

Keynote and most animations normally don't require much CPU or GPU time. While Apple says MacOS Mojave requires 2GB ram it usually consumes 3GB. Add a 3GB presentation you are up to 6GB. With that you can run with a base 8GB Air using an application, caching and other overhead. MacOS handles memory fairly well but for work I'd want some more room.

On your Pro take a look at "Memory Used" under Activity Monitor when doing a presentation to get an idea of what's going on.

 

[appleofmyibook]

On my 2016 MBP I did multiple line draws and it completely stuttered under load.