David Hanak About performance, or its possible absence, much has already been written in connection with the new MacBook Pro. Fortunately, all the theorizing is over, as they started appearing yesterday first review from those who have had a MacBook Air on loan since last week. We can thus get a clear idea of where the new Air stands on the imaginary performance scale.
YouTuber Kraig Adams has published a video in which he describes how the new product from Apple is capable in terms of video editing and rendering. That is, activities for which MacBooks from the Pro series are significantly better equipped. However, as it turned out, even the new Air can cope with this activity.
The author of the video has at his disposal the basic configuration of the MacBook Air, i.e. the version with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of memory. The editing software is Final Cut Pro. Video editing was said to be almost as smooth as on the MacBook Pro, although the editing mode was chosen to prioritize speed over display quality. Moving the timeline was relatively smooth, there was no major stuttering or the need to wait. The only limiting factor at work was the limited storage capacity for 4K video processing needs.
However, where the difference appeared (and a noticeable one) was in the export speed. A sample recording (a 10-minute 4K vlog) that the author's MacBook Pro exported in 7 minutes took twice as long to export on the MacBook Air. This may not seem like a drastic amount of time, but keep in mind that this difference will increase with the length and complexity of the exported video. From 7 to 15 minutes it is not so tragic, from an hour to two it is.
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As it turned out, the new MacBook Air can handle editing and exporting 4K video. If it's not your primary job, you don't have to worry about the lack of performance with the new Air. When he can handle such tasks, ordinary office or multimedia work will not cause him the slightest problem. However, if you often edit videos, render 3D objects, etc., the MacBook Pro will (logically) be a better choice.
