Apperture 3 and new Macbook air

Posted by: musfed on 29 November 2010

I had a little bonus at the end of the year and my two (!) year old Dell laptop is on it's last legs.
Because our household is becoming more and more Mac orienteted (Three Iphones, a macbook and an Ipad) I was thinking of the new Macbook air with Apperture pre installed.
To be fair, I played a little with the new Air at our local apple store and this little flat machine is amazing. Very fast, very thin and just the ultimate laptop for me.
I am a light user of Lightroom on the Dell (just a little fiddeling with photo's) and it takes ages of waiting when the program is rendering my 25mb photo's.
The new Macbook takes just a fraction of a second to process multi MB photo's.
Anybody any experience with the Air and a program like Apperture?
I love laptop's, work all day on them and when my fotoshopping days are getting more serious I'll just by a large Apple monitor to go with the laptop.

Posted on: 29 November 2010 by Derek Wright

I use Aperture on a Macbook Pro and on a Mac pro

Aperture does take a fair bit of processing power and graphics power - If you have seen good performance with your type of raw files on a Macbook Air then go for it. Maximise memory and storage space

I would test it by taking a flash card of the equivalent of a days shooting to the Apple Shop or Dealer and feed them in to Aperture on a Macbook Air and see how long it takes to load and process the images. I would also carry out a few editing activities eg using the brush to smooth out wrinkles, change colour, etc. Do a few crops and then run an export of a batch of images to see how comfortable you are with the performance.

My only other concern with the MacBook Air was ensuring that you had sufficient storage space for a major trip (if you do such things) and that you can back up the images to an external drive.

On my Macboook I like to keep a collection of pictures going back several years and trips for reference purposes. Sio I found a 250MGB drive a bit of a squeeze

An advantage of the Air is that it should continue to work above 10K feet (3048 m) above sea level (the height that regular disk drives start to exhibit problems). Check the specs for the machine.

I suggest that you go to the Apple Discussion Forum on Aperture and ask the question as you will have a better chance of getting people with the experience of this combination of products to give you their opinion.

Posted on: 01 December 2010 by musfed

Thanks Derek. I'll have a look on the apple forum.
I was planning to buy the "maxed out" 13 inch model. It has sufficient disk space to keep up with the way I take pictures. And because Apple sells it with Apperture preinstalled I guess the performance is ok. Just have'nt used Apperture by myself.
I tried the Air with large Photo's (>25mb) and it's way faster then my current laptop.
And ok ok ok, it looks way better to.

Posted on: 01 December 2010 by Lontano

Enjopy the Air - my wife has the older version and loves it, especially the portabilty.

I am sure the Air will be able to handle Aperture and Lightroom. I would make the decision based on which software I prefer. I own Aperture2 and Lightroom3 - I just prefer the flow of Lightroom - it is just more intuitive as far as I am concerned and as a result I rarely touch Aperture. I would go and play with Aperture - maybe download a trial version and make sure you like it first.

Posted on: 21 December 2010 by musfed

I took the plunge and ordered the maxed out 13inch version. It's my first Apple computer and I love it. The look and feel is incredible and the speed of this machine is hard to believe comming from this slender machine.
Apperture is amazing. 25MB pictures are handled incredibly quick and the screen is amazing. Expensive? Yes. Worth it? When you fall for the look and feel, oh yes.

Posted on: 21 December 2010 by garyi

Aperture is a good programme but requires discipline to get the best from it, something I fail on.

The face feature is pretty hit and miss and on big libraries (I have 100gigs on my mac) gets really sluggish.

Recently I moved to an i7 and it seriously flies, but faces is still doggy.