Adobe Lightroom on MacBook Air?

I wanted to ask if someone is using the Adobe Suite (especially Lightroom) on a MacBook (Air)?

Which device do you use? What are you doing with it? Do you use RAW files? How is it going?

Apple even advertises the new Air for video and photo editing. MacBooks are commonly referred to as "Creator Notebooks". In addition, the Adobe Suite is probably THE software on MacOS.

Therefore, I would be very interested in how it works on the current models and what your experiences are with them.

The current MacBook Air won't ship until next week. So there's still no experience. From the performance data, however, you can assume that you can use Lightroom quickly and easily on it.

The "current" version is still the Intel version.

The old Airs are supposed to be practically useless in terms of performance.

You can order the MacBook Air with the M1 yesterday, so that's the current model.

The Intel Airs are not useless but not optimal for Lightroom in terms of performance.

But you don't get it yet. So of course nobody can say whether they are any good…

That's exactly what I wrote. Since you can usually trust Apple's promises in terms of performance and Adobe will probably offer Lightroom for ARM in the near future, I suspect that the performance will be sufficient.

If you suspect that enough * is enough *, that doesn't sound so convincing…

I can only speculate. Otherwise you won't get many answers, as the Intel MBA is really not suitable for Lightroom and RAW development. There's fundamentally a lack of performance and since the Intel CPUs get hot quickly, they throttle quickly.

However, these problems are tackled with the M1, as it is significantly faster and draws less electricity. The MPA will never be the optimal machine for LR, but it will certainly be quite useful with the M1.

Just wait for the first tests.

I'm pretty skeptical about that too.

In the keynote, Apple was quite convinced that the new Air was also great for photo and video editing.

So I would have been interested in how it was on the previous ones. Even the Pro 13 has really bad results in terms of performance.

LR and Co. Use for a lot of the GPU and the integrated GPUs from Intel are simply awful. If Apple's information is halfway true, then the performance of the MBA and MBP13 "will improve significantly with the M1. Hence my assessment.

I've run LR on an nVidia M GPU so far.

But as I said, Apple has already promised a great deal.

I just wonder if there's anything true to it…

The first tests look promising:

https://www.macgadget.de/News/2020/11/12/Geekbench-MacBook-Air-mit-M1-Chip-schlaegt-schnellstes-16-Zoll-MacBook-Pro

Unfortunately, Geekbench ARM and Geekbench x86 are not directly comparable. It has long been known that Geekbench (a synthetic benchmark) runs better on ARM than it does on x86.

Geekbench 5 is already comparable but let's wait and see.

It's more about the fact that poor can handle certain processes more efficiently than x86. In the end, that doesn't say anything about the performance, because a poor chip can't currently perform as well in rendering. CPUs or gpus are used that are not poor

Yes, but as I said, a lot can be expected from the GPU performance, because the M1 can simply be better than anything Intel has presented as onboard graphics so far. The shared memory on the SoC should also have a positive effect here, as it can show its strengths in the interaction between the CPU and GPU.

We will know how well this works on the MBA at the latest by the end of next week when there are more tests and reports from practical use.

So GPU hardly interests anyone?

Who is playing with Soc? Nobody?! The Intel IGpus are also able to play 8k Youtube, what more could you want? And I'm talking about the I5 1035G4 from last year.

The M1 without EGpu support is stupid if you cite gaming as an argument, because it is NOT able to control EGpus. Any normal Intel, on the other hand, does (if the IO is available)

This topic is about Lightroom and RAW processing and not about gaming. Like any other subnotebook, the MacBook Air is not suitable for gaming.

Who is playing with Soc?

Just find out what a SoC is! Then this question does not arise.

I stick to my statement about who is playing on SoC, because strong chips are actually still all non SoC these days.

You should also be careful, because Apple is massively improving their numbers. You have to consider that very much.

The questioner has a MB Pro 2019 I think and the display (with HDR) is worse than his XPS non HDR. Do you notice something?

In addition, the software still has to be optimized for ARM in order to develop its full potential. Of course it takes a while. Before that there was only emulated software, the performance of which was rather more.

Likewise, every EGpu-capable computer or, in the case of desktops, a Macbook without EGpu support is superior. Even with video / photo editing.

In addition, the Geekbench 5 benchmark you mentioned is only partially meaningful, because it may be that the benchmark runs so well because it benefits from ARM to the maximum, but lags behind in practical use. Benchmarks are only partially meaningful, especially when it comes to different operating systems or even chipsets.

Language is also important for the benchmark. Because if the languages and implementation of the languages are not identical, you can't make an exact statement on the performance.

Therefore I'm very critical of the information from Apple.

The fact that apparently little IO bandwidth should be available also makes me shy away. Because the Mac mini does not support 10 GBit ethernet. Funny Especially when it comes to professional applications, the Mac can't exactly shine.

Then only 16GB Ram? You can vacuum them out very quickly. Even with MacOS.

So you should look at the numbers with care, because only in practice will you really see how much Apple has cheated.