Which is pretty impressive performance for a machine that is much lower powered and under half the price! Navigating through the project was fluid and we didn't experience any real differences between the two machines. We then averaged the timesĢ4 Seconds to open the project on a 2.7GHz Quad Core Retina MBP.Ģ6 Seconds to open the project on the 1.3Ghz MacBook Air. This would give the machines the opportunity to write or cache any files it needed. We tested both the MBA and a Retina MBP by opening up and then closing a complex FCPX project from a Thunderbolt drive. So how did the MacBook Air handle FCPX? There is some good news and some very bad news. It's enough space however to put a single report together if you were in a war zone and your pocket Thunderbolt drive had saved your life by taking the bullet hit. Apple say that the flash memory in the new Air is 45% faster than the previous generation.īut will you be using the internal memory for video files? Probably not as 256GB could become limiting once you've downloaded all the applications you need with content. So having powered the machine up and done any software upgrades that were needed, we ran the Blackmagic Speed test.Ī pretty impressive performance that beats a Retina by about 200 MB/s on read and write. USB to Ethernet adaptors could be utilised to get around this problem. If this doesn't seem a problem, remember that connecting to the internet or a network via Ethernet will always be at the end of the chain. All peripherals apart from one would have to be passthrough and not end of chain devices. The lack of a second Thunderbolt port could prove to be a problem. As a comparison, the cheapest 13 inch Retina MacBook Pro has a native resolution of 2560 x 1600. The maximum resolution on the Air is 1440 x 900, so you won't be watching any HD 1080 material pixel on pixel. The Air doesn't have a retina screen which means if you've been used to working with one, you'll find the MBA screen soft. Our first impression was not one of the size, but the display. The front of the MBA chamfers down to almost nothing, the Retina is the same thickness front to back. Connectors on the right hand side are an SDXC card slot, another USB 3 and the machine's only Thunderbolt connector. Travelling without a mains connector with a laptop feels strange & slightly exposed. The moment you stress the MBA with a render, the fan kicks in and battery life will drop a lot more quickly. Power consumption on the MBA is very low and working on the machine doing web browsing or email is possible all day long without a top-up. The two little holes on the right of those are microphones. On the left hand side of the Air you'll find a MagSafe 2 power port, a USB 3 and a headphone connector. ![]() Now that the MacBook Pro has built in flash memory, the back thickness of the two machines is very similar. ![]() ![]() Previously in a comparison to a MacBook Pro, the Air would look very svelte against its bigger brother packing a spinning hard disk. The machine is small, but not as small as you would expect if you are a Retina MacBook Pro user. The machine supplied was a top of the range 13 inch model, 1.3Ghz processor, 4GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage. We reveal some very dramatic performance figures.Īs we said in our previous article, the MacBook air isn't normally a machine that we would have in the office, so a loaner for a month gave us the opportunity to try it out. We had the opportunity to test out a top of the range MacBook Air and naturally we thought it would be a good idea to see how it performed with Final Cut Pro X.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |