Using Macbook air 2017 as a Monitor for a Custom Windows PC

[WinMac1982]

Hello,

I travel a lot and I do video editing. So I'm custom building a PC, but I've been a mac user for the last decade and have several hard drives that are encoded for apple, so I want to have a macbook air. I figured the monitor would be the most annoying thing to travel with and if I could elimininate that by using my macbook air as a monitor for my pc when I need it that would be SO useful.

My budget for everything is about $3,000.

Is this possible? If so, how?

Thanks!

 

[MacInWin]

Welcome to the forum.

Not sure what you mean by "encoded for apple," but if you mean that they are formatted HFS+, the Apple format, a cheaper solution might be to get some software to put in the Windows PC to be able to read/write to the Apple formatted drives. I think Paragon has something, but I don't know how well it works. Their ParagonNTFS lets Apple read and write NTFS (Windows unique) drives, so I suspect the opposite software would well, too. That way all you have to take are the hard drives (assuming they are in enclosures) and attach them to the PC to pull off whatever you want and then use Paragon's software to write back to them.

Of course, the other solution is to pony up for a robust MacBook Pro for that budget and do the video editing on the Mac, but I'm all-Mac and am just slightly biased about that.

 

[WinMac1982]

I'm selling my macbook pro because it's not good with Adobe Premiere. The graphics card has a switching issue. MacBook Pro is a joke. I love the OS for evrything else, but for video editing it's no good. I'd like to have a laptop for comfort and a PC for editing. So the ability to have my laptop as a monitor would be very helpful as lugging around a monitor would be a pain.

 

[MacInWin]

Well, you could buy a larger screen (15") MBP, use Bootcamp to boot into Windows to do the video editing and then reboot into macOS for everything else. To move files from one side to the other an external drive could be used. That way you have just one machine to do both jobs and a lot less to carry around. Just get plenty of memory and plenty of drive space. The memory to ensure good speed video processing under Windows and the drive space because it will be shared between macOS and Windows.

Another alternative MIGHT be to use something like Parallels or VMWare to run a Window virtual machine under macOS directly and avoid the use of Bootcamp. When I run Windows under Parallel on my MBP the graphics is switched to the dedicated GPU and does not switch back. There is a slight speed hit because of the emulation, but the drive is automatically shared between the two systems, a nice feature. But in any case either option is better than lugging a laptop, a PC and a monitor around.