My son is all jazzed to trade in his 2017 i5 macbook Air for either a new M1 air or a mac mini. his main excitement here is to be able to purchase the PRO APPS education bundle with final cut, and logic pro. Curious as to what peoples thought are in how the NEW Air with the standard 8/7 will perform for those programs
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Thoughts on base AIR M1 for final cut pro
- Thread starter joecatz1
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Why is he excited about the Air but not the MacBook Pro?
The MBP is more closely aligned with the goal of using pro apps that need sustained CPU performance.
That said I'm sure the Air will perform more than adequately for student use.
The MBP is more closely aligned with the goal of using pro apps that need sustained CPU performance.
That said I'm sure the Air will perform more than adequately for student use.
My completely uneducated guess: most certainly significantly better than the $1799 Intel MacBook Pro (2020) with the same amount of RAM.
essentially no matter HOW you cut it, the pro ends up about $350 more than the AIR if you use the same RAM/storage "apples" to apples.
its about a $500 difference between the PRO and the MINI for the same chip, same specs... the concept of portability is nice with the laptop for him, and hes going to start "dabbling" with final cut and logic, but does a lot of coding and has a custom built PC he uses now, so the MINI would conceivably just plug into the second port on his monitor and hes good to go.
Really more curious to figure out if the graphics downgrade from the pro or mini to the base AIR is going to present challenges down the line.
its about a $500 difference between the PRO and the MINI for the same chip, same specs... the concept of portability is nice with the laptop for him, and hes going to start "dabbling" with final cut and logic, but does a lot of coding and has a custom built PC he uses now, so the MINI would conceivably just plug into the second port on his monitor and hes good to go.
Really more curious to figure out if the graphics downgrade from the pro or mini to the base AIR is going to present challenges down the line.
Depends if he just wants to dabble with those proggies or he is going to use them extensively. If the latter, def go with the Pro. If the former, go with the Air.
Even though the Air and Pro use the same M1 chip, the Pro may perform better under load due to it's active cooling system. I'd expect the Air to throttle down CPU and GPU due to heat if it's loaded up with image/video/audio editing tasks.
Thanks all.
Right now were back and forth between the 8/7 Air with 256 SSD and the mac mini with 16G and 256.
If we do the mini he'll keep his OLD 2017 Air for now for essentially the same price as if we traded his current AIR for the M1 version. I have to believe for the "dabbling" he'll do, the Air M1 will be sufficient but the mini obviously will be more future proof. I'm somewhat leaning MINI simply because I'm certain of two things:
1. If he starts to do more than dabble, hes going to want to upgrade to a new machine in two years anyway, be that a laptop or desk version
2. if he doesnt do much more than dabble the mini with the laptop he has not is still fine.
Right now were back and forth between the 8/7 Air with 256 SSD and the mac mini with 16G and 256.
If we do the mini he'll keep his OLD 2017 Air for now for essentially the same price as if we traded his current AIR for the M1 version. I have to believe for the "dabbling" he'll do, the Air M1 will be sufficient but the mini obviously will be more future proof. I'm somewhat leaning MINI simply because I'm certain of two things:
1. If he starts to do more than dabble, hes going to want to upgrade to a new machine in two years anyway, be that a laptop or desk version
2. if he doesnt do much more than dabble the mini with the laptop he has not is still fine.
I cut a 10 min corporate film shot on my Sony fS7 (HD, not 4K) on my MacBook Air 11” 2012 and it worked surprisingly well. (I was stuck in a hotel) I’m sure any of the released Macs will do just fine in FCPX. I’m planning to try out the mini. It was mentioned in the Keynote that it played back 8K without dropping frames in Resolve (great news for my 8K Red camera). That’s insane for an entry level machine
d you think the 8/7 air with just 8G memory will be sufficient too? I cant imagine him needing MORE than that for anything but FCPX
True, but the extra 8GB would help a lot on FCPX. Plus, if he’s going to keep it through college, the 16GB would make it a little more future-proof. My guess is that the Air will be OK for “dabbling” with FCPX, and even moderate usage, but would recommend the RAM update.