Thinking of new laptop and looking for feedback

[Frank]

Hi Folks, Thinking of replacing my old laptop, a Sony, with a new iMac. Probably iMac Air with 16Gb. memory and 256 Mb HDD. This will be paired with one of my existing external hard disk drives of which I have a number available. The laptop will be used as a quick and dirty view/edit on the move and when I return home the main editing and cull will be with Photomechanic plus and Photoshop elements/NIK 5. As I am retired, I can no longer afford, and resent paying, Abobe a monthly fee when I bought the full price software before retiring.

I am aware that more memory/more HDD etc is preferable but I want something which is light and portable and just use when I am traveling. I also go to fairly remote areas and light weight is a consideration. Would love to cart along my 27" iMac but it is either that or PC lenses for landscape/architecture which weight a ton but give terrific results.

If anyone has any experience of my suggested set up I would be grateful for anyones thoughts.     

[Kevin M. Cox]

Just to clarify a few terms:

iMac = desktop Mac that is not portable
MacBook = a laptop

So it sounds like you are thinking about a 13" M2 MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD.

For Photo Mechanic purposes I think you should reverse those specs if you don't want to spend more money. Kirk has said before that PM is mostly limited by disk IO and not CPU speed or RAM.

In a Mac, the larger the internal SSD size the faster it runs. So if you're looking to just do quick edits of a lot of photos and mostly care about how fast PM is, you'll get more bang for your buck by sticking with 8 GB of RAM and increasing the SSD to 512 GB.

This is the setup I have (M1 Air, 8 GB / 512 GB) for editing professional and college sports on deadline and it works well.

Of course I'd rather have both more RAM and a larger SSD in general. But for my "on-field" editing computer that could get destroyed at any game, I decided to keep it cheap and have been happy with the results.

[Frank]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for your response.

Really gives me food for thought and makes sense. So will now reconsider my choices in line with your experience.

Thanks, Frank