Is the 2023 MacBook Air powerful enough for Creative Cloud

Clayton, did you ever buy the MacBook Air? I'm considering doing the same chenge because I too am tired uf lugging around my heavy laptop when I travel. 

I do not work with video, I primarily use illustrator, InDesign, and some Photoshop. But, while I travel, I would mostly be using it for quick client requests. It seems like the M3 chip with 8GB of RAM would be a good choice. I would love to hear your impressions!

For light or occational use, yes, it is very capable.

For extended workloads, you really want a MacBook Pro.

For example, an 30 second effects heavy After Effects Composition took my 32GB/1TB 16-inch MacBook Pro M1 Max 1.5 hours to render.  I rendered the same Comp on my 16GB/512GB 13-inch MacBook Pro M1 and it took 9 hours - so there's even a difference among the Pro models.

There Air is a great laptop, but be prepared for things to take longer than they would with a Pro.

That M2 MacBook Air configuration should work very well for InDesign and Photoshop.

If your current MacBook Pro uses an Intel CPU, you are going to find that the Apple Silicon M2 processor should be faster, cooler, quieter (no noisy fan needed because it runs so much cooler), and the battery should last several hours longer.

In the past, the Intel MacBook Air was kind of borderline for Creative Cloud because it was underpowered. But the M1/M2 have improved the Air so much that the MacBook Pro is no longer necessary for InDesign and Photoshop. The MacBook Pro might still be a better choice if you frequently did long exporting or rendering sessions with Adobe Lightroom Classic, Premiere Pro, After Effects, or a 3D application. But InDesign and Photoshop don’t max out the processor for long periods of time, so they should work well with the fanless M2 MacBook Air.

<moved from cc desktop>