Does MacBook Air M1 chip released in 2020 work OK for Premiere Pro?

Report · Oct 27, 2021

Hi,

My current macbook pro is out of date. thinking to get a new macbook but after looking up the spec between pro and air, find out there is not much diff except the nits of brightness. so I wonder if I can just buy the more affortable air vs. pro would be good to go or there is a must-have reason to go with pro? It will be mainly used for the video editings. I really need your professional opinions. Thank you!

Report · Oct 30, 2021

can someone help answer the question?

thank you.

Report · Oct 30, 2021

Moved to Hardware forum.

Report · Oct 31, 2021

The Pro should do a little better than the Air in video editing apps. You see, the Air does not have as good of a cooling performance as the Pro, and thus the CPU will throttle down in clock speed a bit more in the Air than in the Pro.

In either case, I'd recommend ordering the MacBook with 16 GB of unified RAM even though 8 GB would suffice for some workflows.

Report · Oct 31, 2021

Thank you. Does M1 chip work fine with the premiere pro and any Adobe products? Cause I see people now go with intel 10 core. Not sure what the real differences are in performance.

Report · Nov 02, 2021

There may be a few bugs to iron out, as Adobe only officially implemented the native M1 support beginning with the 15.4 version.

As for the 10-core Intel CPU, that's desktop only. No mobile version of the 10th-Gen Intel CPU that was released for Macs has more than eight cores. And in Adobe apps the 8-core 10th-gen Intel CPU does not perform sufficiently better than the base M1 (4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores) chip to justify the massively increased power consumption and cost.

Report · Mar 03, 2022

Do you edit and render H.264/264. The M1 Macs have dedicated hardware encoding and decoding for H.264/265.

Report · Nov 04, 2021

Just to be clear, are you comparing only the 13" MacBook Air with the 13" M1 MacBook Pro, not the newer 14" M1 Pro or M1 Max MacBook Pro?

Because if you are comparing only the 13" models, then the Air is OK for shorter renders, but the Pro will sustain maximum performance longer because it has a cooling fan. Otherwise, you are right that they will be about the same. The 13" Pro may have somewhat better battery life. If you choose one of these, it would be best to order it with 16GB of unified memory. The Air would be a safe choice; not the fastest but certainly not slow either, and a definite step up in performance from any affordable or old Intel Mac.

If you can afford the new 14" models based on the new M1 Pro or M1 Max chips, those should provide much better performance for video editing because they have more CPU and GPU cores, and additional specialized encoders/decoders for some video codecs, and they can be configured with up to 64GB unified memory, but most people would be fine with 16–32GB unified memory.

Report · Mar 02, 2022

This sometimes happens, and it may have been deformed at the factory during assembly.

Report · Mar 07, 2022

Many users and owners of the new MacBook Air and Pro on the M1 are concerned about Adobe app support. Let's get to the bottom of this issue. Which Adobe apps run seamlessly on the M1, and which ones don't. Lightroom is the first app that originally worked on Apple M1 computers. The other apps are not supported. I remember when my SSD drive broke. And I took it to an SSD repair shop that I found at https://www.salvagedata.com/apple-mac-recovery/ . And there, the repairman told me that Adobe is working on getting other apps to work on these computers initially, but they don't have release dates for all the apps yet, and that they planned to release a native version of Photoshop in 2021.

Report · Oct 29, 2022

It's been over a year since this discussion was started.

My judgment is that the M1 MacBook Air, which is still available new as of October 2022 (but now only with the 7-core GPU after the introduction of the newer M2 MacBook Air), is perfectly adequate for 1080p and some 4k editing, especially if a fast external SSD is connected to it.

I did a PugetBench benchmark test run with the base-model M1 MacBook Air that I have been using as my occasional media playback system, and my PugetBench score with the Standard preset went up from 332 (running Premiere Pro 22.6.2 on macOS 12.6 Monterrey) to 467 after I upgraded the OS to macOS 13.0 Ventura and Premiere Pro to 23.0. This level of performance is clearly in the same performance tier overall as a typical 6th-Gen Intel Skylake i7 CPU-based Windows desktop with a discrete GPU that was typical for that desktop's vintage.

It seems as if a clean install of Premiere Pro 23 on macOS made better use of the Apple Silicon than version 22 ever did.