MacBook Air m3 15 (8gb) lags incredibly on gfx 100mp images

I heard so much billshit about apple silicon being so powerful and ram usage absolutely another compared to windows and so on, but in real cases it's just bad.  

By @rapurimanka

No, what you said there is inaccurate. The problem is happening because the hardware specs chosen are not properly matched up with the editing you want to do.

8GB is what the Lightroom Classic system requirements is the “Minimum” amount of unified memory. So you do not have the “Recommended” amount (that’s “16GB or more”), only the “Minimum.” Apple no longer sells 8GB Macs because it just isn’t enough any more.

Now look at the other side of your equation. You said you’re shooting with a Fuji GFX 100S II. Good lord...that is a 102 megapixel sensor! Many of us are using cameras ranging from 20 to 50 megapixels.

So what you have done is take images from one of the highest megapixel sensors available, with its raw files needing at least double the system resources of the raw files of the cameras most of us use, and you combine that with the absolute minimum amount of memory you can get in a laptop which is below the published recommended amount for the software. You cannot expect good performance from that combination. 

For processing power, Apple Silicon is known to be competitive especially on laptops, that part is not BS. If you switched to any comparably priced Windows PC laptop with just 8GB RAM and tried to do the same thing with those 102 megapixel images, it will probably be even slower than the MacBook Air, especially if that PC laptop lacks discrete graphics. Whether Mac or PC, if someone came in and said “I need to edit 102 megapixel raw images” I would probably say “Wow, those files are huge, don’t use a laptop with less than 16GB RAM, 24GB or more would be better.” But your laptop only has 8GB.

If your camera was in the 12 to 24 megapixel range, I think an M3 Air with 8GB could handle that OK, although it wouldn’t be ideal. But 102 megapixel raw files on 8GB? That’s asking for trouble, Mac or PC. 

I have been editing raw files and large stitched panoramas on a laptop older than yours...only an M1, but it has 32GB of Unified Memory and runs great. In fact it runs Lightroom Classic and video editing software well enough that I haven’t been interested in upgrading even after four years on this laptop.

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@rapurimanka wrote:

Exporting is also extremely slow.

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Lightroom Classic supports GPU acceleration for exporting. But that depends on the GPU having enough memory for the GPU. When a Mac exceeds the Recommended amount of memory for Lightroom Classic (more than 16GB), there should be enough memory still available for the GPU to apply GPU acceleration to exporting; this works great on my M1 with 32GB. But on an 8GB Mac, there is probably not enough memory left for graphics acceleration to work, so exporting will be slower.