Does Adobe premier pro works smoothly in 13.3 inch APPLE 2020 Macbook Pro M1 -8 GB/256 GB SSD?

[anoopmacintosh]

Does Adobe premier pro works smoothly in 13.3 inch APPLE 2020 Macbook Pro M1 -8 GB/256 GB SSD without any crash or hang in the long run. Is the above specs ok or should I need to go for 14 inch Apple macbook with 16gb?

[Peru Bob]

The hard drive is too small and 8 GB RAM is not enough.

If you will be editing 4k, you want 32 GB RAM.  

[Warren Heaton]

Now that that the M2 Pro and M2 Max 14-inch MacBook Pro are available, you should be able to find an M1 Pro or M1 Max 14-inch MacBook Pro at a good discount.

Whether you go with a 13-inch MacBook Pro or 14-inch, I'd opt for 16GB of RAM and 512GB of internal storage as the base.

[RjL190365]

I tested a 2020 MacBook Air with only the base specs. The 13-inch MacBook Pro of that era has one additional GPU core enabled (8 cores versus 7 cores).

Although my PugetBench for Premiere Pro scores using both the legacy 0.95.6 version and the current 0.98 version were decent overall for what the MacBook is, I would very, very strongly recommend an external 2 TB USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 or better SSD. 256 GB (of which only about 150 GB would remain available after the required programs are installed) is woefully inadequate for projects, footage and exports combined (exports can run into the tens, if not hundreds, of gigabytes per file). Add to that the fact that SSDs do degrade in performance when more than about 70 percent full, and you would not even want to export intermediate video files encoded with mezzanine codecs at all onto the same internal SSD. That overly small SSD is only good for transcoding one highly compressed video file to another, with noticeable degradation in image quality from one to the next.

[Warren Heaton]

@RjL190365 

Great points about storage.

An 8GB/512GB M1 or M1 MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with fast external storage definately each make for a great base level editing laptop.  I don't think we've ever seen such good performance across Premiere Pro, Media Encoder, After Effects, Audition, Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator at this price point.

I'd still try to get the RAM up to 16GB, though.