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Hey all -
It's been YEARS since I've logged on, in between moves, new laptops, and jobs. Good to see this forum still happening with a TON of familiar names.
Keeping it short, I need a new laptop. I can't justify the spend on a $2k new MBP and considering a 15" M3 Air w/16mb ram. Would this do the job? I'm a heavy Adobe suite user - mainly Photoshop/Illustrator (and sure, that can be dependent on file size).
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my GUESS would be 16mb of ram would be fine if...
...you only have a few (1-3) ram hunger applications also open.
if you have chrome open and 24 tabs active, you will probably run into some headroom or possible heat concerns.
of course, the workaround to heat is a small table fan blowing on the back of the mba but that type of hack is not sustainable.
with the M3, you will be able to take advantage of many of PS's newer M chip reliant tools.
thumbs up.
rob
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As a fellow heavy Adobe user I might be concerned with the 16mb. I have an M1 Macbook Pro with 32mb and I occasionally run out of memory if I am working on multiple hi res images in Photoshop that have lots of layers. If you have lots of room on your hard drive to use as scratch disk space it might not be an issue. I only have a 500gb drive and it's hard for me to keep much more than a 150gb free so that can be a bottleneck.
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Welcome back!
If you are comfortable with refurb models, an M1 MacBook Pro 32/1TB runs ~$1300 or less on ebay. Can add pretty fast storage via the SD card slot too.
Depending on what you are coming from, that MBA is likely enough for many of your projects too.
PS Oh - looks like an M4 MBA announcement is imminent. So keep an eye out for that, too.
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I run the most recent version of Photoshop on an M1 with 8 GB of RAM. Rarely if ever gives me a hiccup.
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I am not familiar with the Adobe products but make sure the version you have runs on a modern Mac and if you need a new version, it may be subscription only. I don't think they sell the perpetual license anymore.
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A current MBA is literally, the definition of "ok for Photoshop."
Illustrator, OTH, is a dog these days. Gobbles RAM and GPU. Could get along on a MBA for light use, but probably not okay for anything sophisticated.
Might wait and see if there's a M4 MBA announcement this week. There's a fair chance that it plays out that it's 30% faster with more memory for the same money.
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I have no direct experience, but I would extrapolate what archipirata says relative to how much you will tax a machine with PS and multiple images and multiple layers. if you are nowhere near that level, I'm guessing you would be fine.
my M1 Mini runs DaVinci Resolve quite well and I am - frankly - blown away by how it works at all with 8gb of RAM.
