I am a photographer, looking to buy an affordable, reliable and great laptop for photoshop and similar programs. Can anyone comment on whether the 13-Inch Macbook Air M1 2020 will tick these boxes for me, or recommend a better option? Thank you.
Depends. Are you an amateur, advanced amateur, or a Pro? While it can quite admirably handle all three, if you are a Pro, you may want to consider the 13" MacBook Pro as it has a fan for cooling for intense, log work sessions. While the Air could handle the functioning, if it starts to get too warm it will start to throttle back until it cools down since it does not have a fan.
Personally, I consider my self an advanced amateur and I use the "step up" M1 MacBook Air model which is the one with the 8 core GPU and not the 7 core that is in the base model. While I gave up on the Adobe Cash Cow (CC) products sometime ago, I can say, the group of apps that I use work very well on the M1. they are:
Adobe Bridge 2021 (while it still remains free) for initial culling and tagging
DxO PhotoLab 4 for RAW processing and conversion
Affinity Photo for some post processing and panorama stitching
EasyHDR3 for HDR merging
Topaz Studio for special effects and some key enhancement functions
BTW, my sessions can run from as few as a half a dozen up to 40-50 images in a session.
Thank you for your response! This is really helpful information! I am currently employed as a in-house photographer and social media manager, so a lot of the files that I work with are fairly small and only need to be big enough to go online. The laptop will belong to the company I work for as I currently use my personal one.
So ideally what I need is a laptop that will last for as long as possible, and be able to handle photoshop, lightroom, those sorts of programs, whilst also being affordable and reliable.
I am unsure whether it would be better to buy something like the 2015 Macbook Pro second hand than buying an 2020 Macbook Air from Apple.
Your advice is very helpful! Thank you!
FWIW, recent benchmark performance tests show that a new M1 MacBook Air or M1 MacBook Pro will perform 3 to 6 times faster than a max speced 2015 MacBook Pro.
13-Inch Macbook Air M1 2020 for photographers
