Apple’s MacBook Pros are usually seen and positioned as the laptop that customers should buy if they want a powerful laptop that can handle intensive photo and video editing on the go. This is thanks to its more powerful CPU and in some configurations, a discrete GPU. However as it turns out, Apple’s new MacBook Air laptop seems to be holding its own just fine.
In a recent video uploaded onto YouTube by Kraig Adams, he does an early hands-on review of the laptop in which he found that the laptop was more than capable of editing 4K video. In the video, Adams had a MacBook Air that was configured with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of SSD storage, although he opted to use an external 1TB drive from SanDisk as part of his workflow.
According to Adams, he found that scrubbing on the timeline and working as he normally does there was not much of a difference, although it seems that export times was when the MacBook Air seemed to stutter slightly. It took the laptop about 10 minutes to export a 15 minute vlog, versus the MacBook Pro which took 7 minutes.
Granted the 3 minute difference isn’t that big, when you have multiple videos that you need to export in a day and if you need it fast, it can start to add up. However if you can’t justify paying almost twice the price for the 15-inch MacBook Pro model and just need a laptop that can do some video editing on the go, then maybe the MacBook Air could be worth checking out.