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The usecase I described may sound like I do a lot parallel, but actually I really have to do things parallel only on a few occasions a year. The rest is mainly audio editing in single track on audition and saving short snippets of audio (preparing raw snippets for radio documentaries, the "real" production happens in a proper studio) , while premiere is open only for the transcript to check the timeline)
I don't do a lot with photos (yet)
leaving all those other programms/windows open is more a matter of convenience (not to say lazyness) so maybe it's time to check myself a bit on that.
By @amdoshimo
Given that clarification, if you need to save the money it is probably OK for you to get a MacBook Air. Most of the time, it will probably work as well as you want it to. I imagine that if you mostly do light single track audio editing, the Air should be able to do that easily, with power to spare and without getting hot.
If you need to do some intensive work occasionally, it will just take a little longer, and if that's worth saving several hundred dollars then that sounds fine. With the release of the M3 Air lowering the price of the M2 Air, many have pointed out that the M2 Air is now a great value.
So if I understand all you guys said correctly, RAM is more important than newer chip or more cores, which then would favor the Macbook Air 13'', M2 8C CPU, 24 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD I guess?
By @amdoshimo
Generally yes, that configuration sounds OK. For primarily light audio editing you won’t need that many CPU cores, and although the M3 is better than the M2 it is not by that much.
To answer the question of how much unified memory your next Mac should have, here is what you should do: On your current 16GB Mac, open Activity Monitor, click the Memory tab, and after an hour or two of doing your normal workload, look at the bottom of the Memory display at the Memory Pressure graph. If Memory Pressure is usually green, 16GB is OK. If Memory Pressure spends a lot of time orange or red, then 16GB is not enough and you should definitely get 24GB next time.
What I find strange though: The activity pressure is in green the whole time, but when starting a transcript on Premiere the CPU quickly goes to between 180% and 210% the macbook gets quite warm and the cooler comes on and the transcript takes a long time.
The used memory is then at app 12,60 the data in cache is at 3,40 and the used swap at app 5,45
So what does that tell me?
By @amdoshimo
It may be normal for the CPU usage to rise that way, because transcription requires processing power and involves some AI. Note that it is not using all of your CPU power. The way macOS reports CPU usage is that 100% equals total use of one core. You have a quad-core CPU, so if it is reporting around 200%, that’s only half the total CPU power available, because on a quad-core Mac complete usage would be 400%.
However, the CPU is working hard, so it gets hot. I can’t find a MacBook Pro 2,3 so is that a typo? But I will guess that MacBook Pro has an Intel processor. If so, what you can expect with a new Mac is that its Apple Silicon processor will run cooler, and transcription will probably not make the fans come on. This is from my experience recently transcribing with Premiere Pro on an M1 Pro MacBook Pro with 8 CPU cores. I was transcribing audio voiceovers that were 20 to 30 minutes long, each of those files only took a couple of minutes, and the Mac stayed cool and quiet. So my suspicion about the heat and fan noise on your Mac is that it’s because it’s an older, less efficient Intel processor.
And as I said earlier, the March 2024 Premiere Pro update adds GPU acceleration to Speech to Text. This provides two benefits: The GPU completes transcription more quickly (Adobe says “more than 15% faster” in that link), and by taking that load off the CPU, the CPU should run cooler during transcription. (In short…it now transcribes faster and cooler than when I was transcribing that big project a few months ago, I wish I had the March 2024 update back then!) If your version of Premiere Pro is up to date but the current Mac does not meet the system requirements for GPU acceleration, it will continue to transcribe using the CPU, and maybe that could be part of the reason you still get heat and fan noise.
Any of the MacBook Air configurations you are considering should be able to GPU-accelerate Speech to Text.
Regarding the memory numbers, they do indicate some load on memory because there is a fair amount in swap. However, if Memory Pressure is green the whole time, then macOS probably thinks that the swap amount is only temporary due to a short-term processing spike. If macOS is having increasing difficulty (not short-term) maintaining performance due to memory constraints, that is when Memory Pressure rises to orange and then red if it gets really bad.
An ideal memory state is Compressed and Swap at or near zero, but it’s unrealistic to think it should be that way all the time, it is normal to have a modest amount of data in Compressed and Swap. Even then, some users just don’t like to see any swap usage; the way to get there is to order the next Mac with more RAM/unified memory. But again, as long as Memory Pressure is always green, there really is no meaningful problem with your current amount of memory.
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