13' MacBook Air or MacBook Pro

I'm upgrading from a mid-2008 white MacBook. Of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, which one will be better to suit my multimedia and portable needs?

I plan on using the Adobe Suite routinely (I have an external hard drive to store photos and video). Which would Final Cut Pro run most smoothly, or is there any serious confliction on either? They both have 8 GB of RAM, so is there any comparison when it comes to video-editing? I would like reliability and ease. I'll be lugging it back and forth from my classroom each day.

I am leaning towards the Air; I like its lightness, portability and comfortability in use. It seems I'm on my laptop more hours in the day than not. And for some reason I like the simplicity of the Air; I am a minimalist and don't need 'extras'. However, I'm only a bit weary in its lack of ports when it comes to transferring via firewire and projecting, etc.

I guess my biggest question goes out to any multimedia folk out there who uses the Air. Have you noticed any issues in video-editing or designing in Adobe Creative Suite? Maybe I shouldn't be worried, as my current MacBook hasn't had any troubles other than slowness in opening the application and what not.

Please let me know of your suggestions. Thanks in advance.

If it's 13" you want and I think you need a bit of higher specs, so GO WITH PRO.
The only great thing with air is its portability and lightness but your purpose does not depend on that at the end of the day!

The Adobe software is PRO software.

Final Cut PRO.

Take the hint.

Pre-configuring either the 13" Air or Pro with 8m RAM makes them $1300 each, but the Pro has a faster CPU and much larger hard drive, while the Air has a solid state drive that is very fast and boots very fast.

To get the bigger drive on the Air really increase the cost, and the biggest you can get is 256gb for another $300. If you have to carry an outboard drive with the 128gb Air standard drive, that kind of defeats the purpose of the lighter/smaller format of the Air vs the Pro.

If I were going to do serious software (Final Cut, PhotoShop, ProTools) I'd go with the Macbook Pro.

The Pro gives you more options:

1. Can upgrade RAM to 16GB.
2. Can replace HDD with SSD.
3. Can replace the Superdrive with extra storage.

Also, a person tends to underestimate what they need from a machine - don't limit youself. I recently started out looking at an Air because I also love the portability and compactness of the design. After some consideration though, I decided to go with a 13" Pro. On receiving the machine, I installed the applications I use and realised the dual-core 13" MBP still didn't quite cut it, so I went for a 15" with a 7200rpm HDD and am now very happy.

Read this thread, it may get you thinking...

you can only go to 8M ram on a 13" macbook pro, same as the Air (but you can buy your own ram for the pro, which is considerably cheaper than having Apple preinstall as you must on the air). The new 15" retina pros can go to 16M ... perhaps the rumored 13" retina's will have that expansion as well, but I assume they will be more expensive than the current 13" pro.

Daddy Elmis said:

you can only go to 8M ram on a 13" macbook pro, same as the Air (but you can buy your own ram for the pro, which is considerably cheaper than having Apple preinstall as you must on the air). The new 15" retina pros can go to 16M ... perhaps the rumored 13" retina's will have that expansion as well, but I assume they will be more expensive than the current 13" pro.

Click to expand...

No, the MacBook Pros can support up to 16GB of RAM, including the 13in Pro.