This week I got the new Apple Macbook Air 13″ with the 1.8ghz Intel Core i7 ULV Processor, and 256gb SSD. Here are some of my initial thoughts.
Compared to my old Core i7 15″ Macbook pro, it rocks. The processor is still an i7, but the clock speed is slower, and it’s a new “ULV” model, so – the architecture is actually more advanced than the i7 in my MBP, however I believe it’s actually probably a bit slower, because of the slower clock speed and overal more toned down performance of the chip for power savings. However, the SSD is FAST! The main slowdown on my MBP was the slow hard drive – whenever I was waiting on stuff on my old computer, it was always waiting to load up raw files off the disk, etc. With lightroom (and aperture), as soon as you import photos, it renders previews in the background – so you’re actually not doing that much live processing when you’re sorting through photos and editing. Really, you’re just looking at native resolution rendered previews, and then applying adjustments as metadata, which is temporairly overlaid on the previews you’re looking at. It’s only when you export the images that the actual adjustments are computed onto the master file and rendered at full resolution. So the really processor intensive tasks are all ones that happen in the background. The loading of the preview images and adjustment parameters are the operations that take place “live” as I’m working, and those are the tasks where the drive speed, not the processor speed, really comes into play. So.. given all of that.. this thing rocks! I just edited this set on it, and it was great!
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