[shuttertalk]

If you've been keeping an eye on the new 11 inch macbook air, and were wondering whether it would make a good photoshop machine (answer: no) then there's a performance chart on Engadget worth looking at.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/07/macbo...-reviewed/

It appears that it's at least 1.5 to 2x slower than most macbook pros, including ones from 2009, in running Photoshop CS4. It's perfectly understandable though - the line is designed for portability and form factor, not for performance. Plus, the 11inch screen might not be the best for real estate anyway.

[matthew]

I have a desktop computer that works as my 'command centre': terrabytes of storage, two monitors (each bigger than my TV), four-button trackball, firewire CF card reader, USB links to my printer and both scanners, and so on. All that I'm really looking for is a light and portable replacement for my 4.5-year-old Macbook 1,1 - the original Intel-chipped Apple laptop - making a tablet ideal.

I've been waiting to see what Apple's competitors would offer, and how the market would mature.

This morning I ordered the 11" Macbook Air with the 1.6GHz processor, 4GB RAM, and 128GB SSD. The Engadget article is a snippet of the results from Anand's review of it, where he found a 10-20% performance boost over the base model. (Apple's own website shows nearly a 50% cost boost, but that's another discussion.)

I'll let you know how it works in real life in a couple of weeks.

[Wedding Shooter]

Am very interested to hear your feedback.

[matthew]

So I've been living with the Macbook Air for six weeks or so, and today I used it for "real" photo editing for the first time. I've been running Lightroom on it since the beginning, but only using it for my P&S jpegs. Today I was out taking some photos with the D700, and was able to process the raw files, colour correct, light retouching, as well as some tonal corrections without any problems. The best part was exporting the selects and handing them over to the graphic designer who would be doing the finishing work. Being able to process the files on the spot and finish the job in just a couple of hours – while a hundred kilometres from home – was absolutely worth working on a small screen and a slower computer.

The little laptop is a perfect fit in my new Kata 3n1-22 backpack, as well. I bought it because I wanted to be able to carry the laptop and camera safely on my bike, and the pack is narrow enough that I can check behind me without obstruction. It fit both the D700 and F100, along with three little lenses and two speedlights, and miscellaneous cables. I know I like something when I buy a new bag for it.

As a 'production machine' the little Macbook Air would be pretty hopeless, not just because of its small screen (which is actually a decent resolution and very good quality) but because it would need an external hard drive in short order. That goes a long way to defeating the point of having a small laptop, so there's no way I would ever endorse it as an only computer.

But for running Lightroom with smaller files, or as an on-the-spot machine that doesn't need a lot of storage, it does a great job. I've been using it for a lot of writing, and even done some audio editing with Audacity. In the same idea that the camera that gets used is better than the one that sits at home, if I had a monster 15" or 17" laptop I wouldn't be able (or willing) to carry it with me. I'd get a lot less use out of a 'better' laptop.

[Pavel]

An alternative to this MAC is my inexpensive laptop with awful screen. It has ample power to be able to run easily Lightroom and Bridge. The monitor quality is poor and there is no point calibrating, as changing the viewing angle completely changes the image appearance. It has a decent drive capacity and so this is perfectly adequate solution for storage, preview and pruning - all I would do in the field anyway and at a fraction of MAC price.

[Toad]

Interesting. My little eeePC will run LightRoom as well, as is great as an email/internet device and as a place to store thousands of photos taken on the road, but it is pretty much useless as an image processing device. It can be used in a pinch, but not great.If I was doing pro type work on the road, I might consider the Air.

In other news,its my last day in Italy before homeward bound tomorrow. Lots of opinions saved up about how all the gear I took to Italy performed (or didn't). I'll do a follow-up report card on my gear soon.

[shuttertalk]

Price aside, one thing going for the macbook air is the solid state hard disk. Granted, it's not very big but it helps the performance of what is an underpowered (by design, for portability and battery life) computer.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/...video.html

[Pavel]

Price aside, one thing going for the macbook air is the solid state hard disk. Granted, it's not very big but it helps the performance of what is an underpowered (by design, for portability and battery life) computer.

A lot depends on what you use the machine for. I use my laptop only on the road for e-mails, internet, short letters end storage of a largish number of photos and pruning these photos. Performance is not all that critical but the storage size comes into play. A good screen like iMAC's would be nice, but it is not essential.

[matthew]

The problem with inexpensive laptops/netbooks is that they often have lousy screens. The Air certainly isn't inexpensive, and it shows.

One huge improvement over my old laptop, as well as over my current desktop, is how quickly the machine wakes from sleep. By the time I have the lid open, it's connected to my home Wifi network or asking me which one I want to join. It powers up and is ready to use in about 15-20 seconds from a cold start. That's mostly due to it having an SSD instead of a traditional hard drive, and makes it quite a bit quicker than its processor specs suggest. (I also have the model with 4GB of ram, which doesn't hurt.) I typically remember something that I was going to do as soon as I close the computer, and now that's no big deal.

Having the SSD means that the Air has limited storage; for half the price, I could have gotten a bulkier, heavier "travel laptop" with the same screen size and resolution, but a 320GB HDD instead of the 120GB SSD that I enjoy. That might make a difference for a long trip, but the storage that's available to my desktop computer is measured in terabytes. No laptop can compete with that – but when I travel I'll be storing most of my data on write-once data cassettes called 'film', not hard drives.

The best thing about my Air is that it works very well from the couch, where I use it for pretty much everything.