Last week, my M1-powered MacBook Air arrived.
- Final Cut Pro Macbook Air Free
- Final Cut Pro X Macbook Air
- Final Cut Pro Macbook Air Download
- Mac Pro Air Laptop
I had opted for the base spec version – literally the cheapest M1 MacBook you can buy. That meant it arrived with an 8-core processor, 7-core GPU, a 256GB SSD drive and just 8GB of RAM.
- To be more precise, we had both Final Cut Pro (which had just finished an export of a 4K movie) and Photoshop open along with 14 other apps. That’s a lot to run on any consumer Mac, let alone a.
- A powerful processor is a foundational need for high profile video editing software like Adobe Premiere & Final Cut Pro. It will use up most of the CPU cores available and also require hyperthreading. The MacBook Air is powered by a modest Intel processor from the Y-series of processors.
- I'm thinking of getting a MacBook Air, for a lot of reasons having nothing to do with FCP X, but I'd like to be able to use FCP X on the MBAir. It would appear that the MBAir and a Thunderbolt Display would make a good combination, since it has six ports thru which one could connect more the storage than you'd ever need.
Comparison between an iMac (27 ″) from 2017 and the new MacBook Air M1 from 2020. In Albert Navarro’s own words, Apple has produced a “very round” product, with an impressive balance between the power it is capable of offering and the price, which makes it perfectly usable as a travel machine to solve emergencies (in its case that he is a multimedia producer in his company BCNON).
8GB! In 2020!
By comparison, my 16” MacBook Pro is a beast. Intel i9 8-core processor, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and the best discreet graphics available.
I have a full M1 MacBook Air review in the works, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d just spent £999 on an M1 MacBook. Could it really keep pace with my £3,500 MacBook Pro?
So, I decided to run a little test, and the results were fascinating.
You can watch the video, here:
The Final Cut Pro battle
With limited time on my hands, I decided to conduct a quick but thorough test with a tool which I knew would put both machines through their paces.
This involved one piece of 4K footage that was 10 minutes long, and two tasks:
- a simple colour grade render; and
- an export to disk.
Why did I pick these two tasks? As a video guy, I know they’re two of the most important functions my computers perform. The speed with which they do so will dictate how quickly I can publish my YouTube videos or get paid by clients.
Pretty important, then.
I’ve been using the MacBook Pro 16” for around a year now, and it is a superb machine. Despite the emergence of the M1 chip, I think the 16” still has a place today within lots of people’s lives and businesses.
But I am intrigued to see how it performs against the M1. My 16” MacBook Pro has worked flawlessly for 12 months, and consistently undertakes the two tasks that would play a central role in this battle with ease.
Final Cut Pro Macbook Air Free
Here’s what happened during the test.
Final Cut Pro X Macbook Air
The colour grade render
The rules for both tests were simple:
- the same piece of footage
- the same version of Final Cut Pro
- only built-in Final Cut Pro plugins
- no apps running in the background, bar the built-in macOS screen recording feature
- power supply, rather than battery operation
- same export settings
The colour grade was simple; an introduction of some contrast, slight bump in exposure and a boost to saturation.
The M1 MacBook Air completed the task in around two minutes. It screamed through it, in fact. That alone was impressive.
But I wasn’t really prepared for what happened next.
The 16” MacBook Pro took about five minutes and was noticeably slower. Its fans were also roaring and near takeoff speed, and the metal above the keyboard was too hot to keep your finger on for any longer than a few seconds.
The Air? Silent (it has no fan), and barely lukewarm.
Yikes.
This genuinely surprised me, as you’ll see in the video reaction at the top of this article. A £999 laptop had just spat loose tarmac into the front grille of its £3,500 cousin in a display of raw pace.
The export
This task was simpler to undertake, but just as intensive – if not more so – processor-wise, than the render.
Ensuring I had both laptops exporting with the exact same settings and to their respective desktops, I hit ‘go’ and started the timers.
This was the result:
- 16” MacBook Pro export time: 05:10.29
- M1 MacBook Air export time: 13:08.23
Surprised? Yeah, me too. And isn’t it weird how that’s the case, given that we should really be rooting for the 16”? Alas, its performance with the colour grade set brand new expectations for this equally nascent Apple silicon-powered computer.
But the Air struggled – really struggled. In fact, while the 16” MacBook Pro was hurtling towards 20% completion, the Air was languishing in single digits.
Without thinking, I decided to sit back, wait and stop the screen recording on the Air. And then it sped up – big time. In fact, the cancelling of the screen recording propelled that little machine onto an export speed not that dissimilar to the Pro.
It had clearly struggled performing both a Final Cut Export and a screen recording at the same time. The Pro didn’t at all, and as several people in the comments section of my video noted, it’s probably down to the RAM.
Maybe 8GB versus 32GB is a conversation worth having, after all…
Conclusion
I’m deeply impressed by the M1 MacBook Air just three days in. This test was fascinating not just because of the way in which it murdered the 16” during the rendering test, but because it was given a dose of its own medicine during the export.
This illustrates that for all the hyperbole surrounding the launch of the M1 – and I’m just as excited as everyone else – it is still incredibly early days. More importantly, these Intel-powered Macs still have plenty of life left in them and shouldn’t be kicked to the curb quite as quickly as some in the tech press seem so keen to do.
Incidentally, I also edited the video at the top of this blog with the M1 Air. And it did a superb job. However, that potential RAM issue did rear its head again during what was a relatively complex timeline; the odd beachball surfaced and frames consistently dropped. That wouldn’t have happened with the 16” MacBook Pro.
This is going to be a fascinating few years for the Mac. I can’t wait to dive more into the M1 and see how it compares against its Intel equivalents, but if my test proves anything, it’s that not everything is quite what it seems when you look beyond those raw benchmark figures.
Stay tuned for my full M1 MacBook Air review!
The new Retina MacBook Air will officially be available to consumers on Wednesday. Ahead of that release, early first-looks at the new device continue to trickle out to YouTube. Today, YouTuber Kraig Adams shared his hands-on with the new Retina MacBook Air, putting it through tests editing 4K video using Final Cut Pro.
Adams says that using the 13-inch Retina MacBook Air in its base configuration, he was able to edit videos at his “own speed.” He notes that he used the “Better Performance” setting for his timeline view rather than the “Better Quality” option.
“Scrubbing on the timeline and working as I normally do, there’s really not that much of a difference,” Adams said referring to performance between the MacBook Air and his MacBook Pro. Due to the MacBook Air’s standard 128GB SSD, however, Adams did opt to add an external 1TB drive from SanDisk to his editing workflow.
In terms of export times, there’s a clear difference between the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The MacBook Air was able to export a 10-minute vlog in 15 minutes, whereas the MacBook Pro was able to do so in 7 minutes. While this isn’t a huge difference, it certainly does highlight the difference in power between the two machines.
The new Retina MacBook Air is powered by a 1.6GHz dual-core 8th-generation Intel Core i5 processor with a standard 8GB of RAM. You can upgrade the RAM to 16GB, but the machine Adams was using featured the base 8GB. Meanwhile, Adams’ MacBook Pro is a 2016 model with a 3.3GHz Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM.
Ultimately, Adams says the new MacBook Air is perfectly capable of serving as his primary edit machine. “I could absolutely shoot and edit everything I create as a YouTuber with this MacBook Air, and this is a base model,” he concluded.
Early Geekbench tests have shown the new MacBook Air to offer modest performance improvements over the previous-generation MacBook Air, as well as the 12-inch MacBook. We’ll likely learn more about the device’s performance when it’s officially released on Wednesday.
Did you order a new Retina MacBook Air? Let us know down in the comments!
Final Cut Pro Macbook Air Download
Mac Pro Air Laptop
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links.More.