MacBook Air and photo editing

Crikey 128G... You couldn't fit an omelette on that if that's the only space you have available and you want to do lots of work...
 
Yup :thumbs:

I use it, not as a primary machine, but as an out in the field machine. For this purpose, I went with the 13", 2GB RAM, 128GB SSD and two 300GB External drives. I run LR3 and MS Office 2011.

The thing to note, LR loves RAM, and more so if you have a relatively large library. As this is my field machine, I never have more than 60GB worth of pictures (over a two week trip) vs. over 2TB on my MBP. For this, the specifications I have are good enough, and I don't see it as a slow machine at all; but by no means is it a fast one either.

It's light, very light, sleek and the screen size is a far cry better than the 11".


Crikey 128G... You couldn't fit an omelette on that if that's the only space you have available and you want to do lots of work...

Actually, you can fit a couple of omelettes, both sunny side up :thumbs::thumbs:; you just need to use them within their intended purpose.

If you're doing video editing, then forget it. If you're editing RAW images, how big is a TIFF file from a Hasselblad, no more than 200MB :shrug:. Presuming 64GB will be taken up by the Operating System and Applications, the remaining 64GB should be enough for 320 TIFF images at 200MB each, or 4267 RAW images at 15MB from a Nikon D700. That's not bad at all.
 
I will happily get an external drive as well when space becomes an issue, I'm sure 256GB SSD will keep me going for the short term :)

I think for the price difference, between the 128GB SSD vs. 256GB SSD, you could buy a good 300GB USB2 external drive, if not even a 500GB :shrug:

As for the RAM, I am not sure if these are user-upgradable or not; but I would opt for the 4GB; as I generally note that you just can't have enough RAM (within reason).
 
have apple sorted out TRIM support yet? if not that may be a reason to avoid SSD in macbooks..

I haven't the faintest idea :thinking:. As a matter of fact, I didn't know of an issue with TRIM until I read your post, which made me read-up about it.

It seems, as we stand, Apple haven't sorted this out :shrug:
 
I replaced the standard hard drive in the with a 128gb SSD drive. Been running it since April and have not noticed any performance issues. One of the best performance updates I have done, the startup time for the laptop and apps is significantly quicker when compared to a normal hdd
 
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