FCX: MacBook Air vs. MacBook Pro

[DaMax85]

Hi all. Getting ready to upgrade my laptop following this week's Apple Event.

I use my laptop for mostly basic tasks except for Final Cut X. I'm an amateur content creator, working mostly with video shot on the iPhone and doing simple edits in FCX. I am beginning to step up my FCX game though and am wondering a few things:

1. Should I absolutely upgrade to 16gb's of ram on either machine?
2. On an Air, should I bump up to the i5 processor?
3. Does anyone use an Air for FCX?
4. Is it worth the extra money for me to go Pro? I don't care about the Touch Bar and a few extra seconds for rendering and exports doesn't bother me either.

I'm coming from a 2016 12" MacBook. It's been a good computer, but gets pretty laggy on FCX and the machine gets VERY warm, plus the battery is ready for a replacement. I also miss a 13" display -- feels much more substantial than the 12"

I'd appreciate any input. Thanks!

 

[ColdCase]

If you don't like warmth, go with the Pro. They are better built to handle the heat generated. I see a significant difference in export times between my late model pro and i7 air. If you can get by with iMovie, the air can handle that just fine.

Worth is subjective. The air is a nice little computer, I take it everywhere.

 

[sevoneone]

I think it is really hard to give you advice prior to the event on Tuesday, if that is what you are waiting for, as we know nothing about how Apple Silicon Macs will perform at video editing. My guess is that we're going to see some very big increases in Metal api performance in even the lowest end notebooks. Apple has been heavily optimizing all the pro Apps for Metal and my personal guess is that the new Apple GPUs and/or even dedicated custom ASICs are going to turn some heads in the type of rendering performance they pull off.

I also personally think we'll see hardware acceleration for 10-bit HVEC across the board to complement people creating content with the new iPhones, and the MacBook Pro models will almost certainly have some form of Afterburner tech from the MacPro to boost ProRes and high-res/high-frame rate performance.

I could be totally wrong, but we'll only know after Tuesday.