Macbook Air: Viable option for graphic designers?

Posted by wavvytype on October 11, 2012 04:24 pm 38

hello verge,

im a young graphic designer, in my senior year of college looking to switch up my macbook pro (late 2011,13in, 2.3GHz i5, 4GB memory, OSXLion).

i do alot of freelance and schoolwork on it, running the adobe creative suite quite often sometimes several of those programs at a time plus itunes, chrome, and sparrow open as well. i dont have tons of programs installed and quite often go back and uninstall things i find my self not using as much as thought i would. right now im using about 115/320gb, about 25gb of it is music, and 50gb of whatever "other" stands for, the remainder is small partitions of videos and photos and what not. i occasionally play TF2 on steam, but thats about it for gaming.

i was thinking of selling it and switching to this air.

13-inch : 128GB

• 1.8GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor
• 4GB memory
• 128GB flash storage1
• Intel HD Graphics 4000

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its a pretty big drop in specs. the memory is not a big concern since i plan to get an external HD anyways. what really concerns me, since this will be my computer for working at home is will i see a significant drop if at all in performance? im not a huge comp wiz, but i know the higher the Ghz the better, but i really like the portability of the mba and im not sure if flash strorage is better for what i do on my comp.
im not opposed to upgrading the internals, but if i have to spend several hundreds just to get it up to par with my current set up, id rather just wait for apple to release a more capable mba in the future before upgrading.
so, im asking for your expertise to help me decide if the MBA is a viable option as a graphic designer? any of you with personal experience using a MBA on the "field" for graphic design? id love to hear personal stories.
thanks.