Anyone Using MacBook Pro 13" or MacBook Air 13" (2019) To Edit?

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JohnD19

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Lightroom version: 3.0 [ 20191017-0835-b386176 ] (Oct 17 2019)
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  1. macOS 10.15 Catalina
Hi. I'm looking at the above two laptops and am trying to get some feedback/user experiences for both Cloudy Lightroom and regular Lightroom. Whichever one I choose will be used as a travel device and my very capable iMac 27" will still be used at home. Thanks!!!!
 
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I have a 2018 MacBook Air and an old 2012 iMac 27". It has worked out very well. In fact, I had a 2015 MB Air before that, but I really wanted the retina display and had hope I'd see a big speed increase. I got a decent speed increase, but it was mostly the disk and thunderbolt. Imports are much faster on the new Air than either of the old computers. However, the old iMac catches back up during the 1:1 preview building of the import. It processes in parallel while the Air still does import and then preview build.

At this point I need to replace the iMac and am back and forth between a new iMac or the 16" MacBook Pro. The latter would be a single computer solution, which should be fine, but I've always had two. Kind of like shooting with dual cards, I've gotten use to having a fallback. But I digress.
 
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If it's going to be used mostly for travel, both models should work.

What might sway you one way or the other is:
  • How much editing do you want to do while on the road? If it’s mostly for copying images off cards, using embedded previews, maybe some quick edits for just a few images to export and share on the road, the Air should be OK. But if you want to do a fair amount of editing on the road or build previews for everything you import, the two cores of the Air CPU will hold you back; the four cores of the MacBook Pro CPU will be faster at preview generation and editing.
  • How large are the images from your cameras? If they're out into the 24-36 megapixel range, the Air might be slow; a 13" MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM would provide performance closer to what you get from the iMac.
That’s based on the 2019 models of the MacBook Air and the 13" MacBook Pro (low end, with two Thunderbolt ports). In terms of CPU performance alone, that MBP is 15-20% faster at single-core performance, and 4 to 5 times faster in multi-core performance, over the MacBook Air. The MBP with four Thunderbolt ports is slightly faster than that, but is probably getting outside a budget for a travel-only computer. If you’re looking at an older (before 2019) low-end 13" MacBook Pro, avoid the dual-core models because they might not be better than the latest Air.

I use a quad-core 13" MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM as my Lightroom Classic computer, and most of the time Lightroom Classic performs well on it, especially at my desk with an eGPU using Lightroom Classic graphics acceleration and driving 2 large displays. The new 16" MacBook Pro would be a higher-performing single-computer solution, but I wanted the superior travel portability of the 13".
 
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Before you jump onto a MBP or MBA, What applications do you consider essential "on the road"? I switched to a 12.9" iPad Pro with 528GB of RAM/Storage and have started using Lightroom (cloudy) to import to my Lightroom Classic desktop. I cull and do basic edits with Lightroom and can instantly share newly shot images from my Nikon z7.

With my iPad Pro I can send and receive email, Browse the web with Safari, Word Processing and Spreadsheets are available with Pages and Numbers just like on MacOS.
 
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That sound appealing but I don' see myself using the cloud anytime soon so I'd still need a laptop for LR9, etc. Maybe that will change one day.
I bought the least expensive Air I could find. I read about all these performance issues and I just did some heavy editing with LR9 and did not really suffer anything. It isn't a rocket but it holds it's own. I'm also running PS, DXO PL and Canon's DPP.

These are the specs with 121GB storage. 60GB is free. OS = Catalina.
 

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I’m using LR 6 perpetual on a 2017 custom build 12” 1.4 GHz Macbook for light/moderate editing and it works fine with Catalina.

Definitely more sluggish than on my old 15” Macbook Pro but I really like carrying a smaller and lighter laptop around.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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rewagner said:
I’m using LR 6 perpetual on a 2017 custom build 12” 1.4 GHz Macbook for light/moderate editing and it works fine with Catalina.

Definitely more sluggish than on my old 15” Macbook Pro but I really like carrying a smaller and lighter laptop around.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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The OP can not buy LR6 and LR6 will not install on Catalina because the installer is not 32bit. You can upgrade to Catalina if LR6 is already installed because LR6 is already 32bit but the installer is not
 
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