Long Battery LifeĪnother benefit you’ll enjoy as a MacBook Air user is the outstanding battery life. One of the benefits of using a MacBook Air for graphic design is that there’s no fans and no fan noise (hence the name “air”.) Using this sleek new laptop has been a refreshing change of pace for when I’m working on the go. However, after using the MSI laptop for a while, I found the fan noise to be too obnoxious (not to mention how hot it gets!) No Fan NoiseĪ couple of years ago I wrote a post comparing the MacBook Pro with an MSI gaming laptop, explaining why I chose to go with MSI. I don’t know if this is because the Adobe apps were designed to run on the MacOS, or if it’s because of how well Apple’s components communicate with each other, but somehow Photoshop and Illustrator both run better on my MacBook Air than they do on my Threadripper rig with a RTX 2080 Super that I built last year. As you can see from the specs table above, it’s more than enough to handle the likes of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and so on.Īnecdotally, my experience with using the Adobe Creative Suite on the new MacBook Air has been nothing short of flawless. The pros of going with the new M1-powered Air are as follows: ARM-Powered M1 ProcessorĪpple’s new M1 chip provides more power than previous generations, and it’s enough to challenge its Intel-based adversaries. Premiere Pro with native support for the M1 chip remains in beta, with a public release coming soon, according to Adobe.If you’re considering using a MacBook Air for graphic design then there are some pros and cons you should consider for deciding to do so.

New styling tools in Adobe XD: Inner Shadow, Outline Stroke, and Angular Gradient.

Powerful new retouching features in Photoshop Express, including skin smoothing, content aware healing, face aware liquify and caricature.

Lightroom Ecosystem: New Premium Presets, collaborative editing capabilities, Super Resolution in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic (previously available in Adobe Camera Raw), and custom crop aspect ratios in Lightroom.

Most notably, its Illustrator, InDesign, and Lightroom Classic apps now run natively on Macs with the M1 chip, resulting in faster performance.Ĭreative Cloud apps are on average over 80% faster on an M1 Mac compared to an identically configured Intel-based Mac, according to Adobe.Īdditional notable new features and workflow improvements in today's releases, per Adobe: Adobe today announced the release of major updates across its Creative Cloud software suite.

Adobe illustrator m1 macbook