Alan Kefauver wrote:
Laptop for Safari?
Trip one: took my iPad Pro (1 TB), downloaded photos to it every day and let it sync with the cloud over night. Ok for culling, not good for editing.
Trip two: Took an MSI laptop with i9 and rtx graphics. Great, but heavy and the PS is a brick. Not good on bush planes. Poor battery life. Over heated in the African sun.
Trip three: Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i. Major Wifi issues in Kenya. Light, fast, great battery llife, and then the screen failed in Africa. No available repair in Nairobi or elsewhere. Qualcom chip had to run LrC in emulation and poorly at that. LR Cloudy was OK. When i got back, Lenovo said not covered in warranty as it had water damage. (Had a water bottle in backpack with all my gear, but no leaks but a little condensation)
Trip four: Macbook Pro M4 14", with M4 Pro chip and 24 GB UM. Fabulous but throttled some with DxO running batch noise reduction in the background while using LrC with several Browser tabs open and syncing with LR cloudy at the same time. Upgraded to 48GB UM...all issues disappeared. The thing is a beast. Got it because all the Pangolin people had MBPros. Tried to hate it as everyone knows Windoze is better. (). It took everything I threw at it with style and grace.
After great experiences with the MBP (taxed it with everything I had: i.e LR, LrC, Dxo PR5 and PL9, Luminar, and even fooled with Affinity), Last week I bought a Mac Studio and dumped Windoze altogether after 40 years. M4 Max, 128GB Unified Memory and a two TB SSD. Should have done it sooner. On the road the MBP will talk to the Studio at home. It all talks to my iPhone and Watch as well. All my other software (except some Ashampoo stuff) and the photo stuff runs on the Mac like lightening. Five seconds or less to Denoise a CR3 45 mps file in LrC. PS AI stuff? I don't even need to use cloud credits. All runs locally.
I am now firmly a Mac user. Took a bit to transfer my Windoze brain to Mac, but actually easy.
Just my $0.02
They're right when they say "Once on a Mac, You'll never go back."...Show more →
Did you do the upgrade from 24gb to 48gb? I know when I tried to upgrade my daughter HDs years ago on Macbook, it was not as easy as it was for PC. Also, what gpu is in this machine?
aboulenein wrote:
I'll be contrarian on the Macbook Air recommendaions, based on first-hand experience. The Macbook Air, compared to the same generation Macbook Pro (i.e. M4 vs. M4), is excruciatingly slow to do batch image processing. And when it gets hot enough to thermally throttle the CPU speed/performance over and above its slower speed vs. other models, then it becomes pretty much unusable for anything more than the most trivial image manipulations. And rest assured that it will thermally throttle - it's simple physics. The same great form factor that makes it so light and portable also is what causes it to have a much lower TDP (thermal design point) resulting in thermal throttling when the somewhat larger and beefier models with active cooling would still be good.
I purchased an M4 Air, tried my usual LR and PS flows on a number of photos, and it was just excruciating to sit there waiting for it to do something like a denoise or any AI-type intensive operation. Photo AI (now Topaz Photo) and DXO PureRaw were pretty much unusable. I wound up returning it and replacing it with an M4 Pro CPU with enough horsepower, enough memory and less exposure to thermal throttling....Show more →
If you only had one machine to do everything on I would agree, MBP is obviously better. But since we are talking about going on safari here, I think most people who can afford expensive travel like that have a main machine at home, and a lightweight travel machine for the road. MBAir is a great option for the road and it will handle everything you throw at it, but I agree if you are doing heavy batch processing often on the road an MBP would be a better choice, although heavier and bigger.
Methodical wrote:
I should've included this information in the original post:
My main workstation has the Ryzen 9 7900X, 4090 gpu, Gen 4 NVME, 128gb ram. What laptop (PC or Mac) would be comparable to my desktop setup?
I think the important question relates to my post above. What do you plan to do while you are traveling? Are you using your laptop for reviewing and backing up your images, and maybe processing a few here and there? Or will you be coming back to your safari tent every night and batch processing the 3000 photos you took that day? Most people I see on safari do the former and prefer the lightest and most compact solution, which is the MacBook Air. Or, if you aren't taking a ton of camera gear and your load is fairly light, then a MacBook Pro is easily manageable and a power house.
Rivermist wrote:
Interesting counterpoint indeed, what was the memory of the MacBook Air? It is only recently that 16 GB has become standard, and the 8 GB of earlier models did indeed not tolerate much in terms of heavy apps (guess that now 24 GB would be the better option). I do not know DxO or PhotoAI, but I do notice that my PS Adobe software is generally very resource intensive and still does a lot of swapping even when you have ample memory. I switched to ON-1 5 years ago for RAW workflows and find it quite efficient, with a net improvement using the 2025 and subsequent versions. On the question of which model, the laptop and/or tablet I travel which is not the workhorse, it needs to be robust and lightweight, and allow for enough software features to verify that the day's shooting does not have any fatal flaws from either inept photographer choices, wrong camera settings or some malfunction of the cameras or lenses. I leave more in-depth processing to when I get home. Since travel involves some level of physical and environment abuse, I prefer that the computer be relatively inexpensive and ultimately expendable, so a $900 MacBook Air is a fair compromise. (camera insurance does not include computers)....Show more →
Having read this thread - and a lot of great recommendations presented - I agree with this. You just need to review images. You're not looking for a desktop replacement. That machine is back home running windows. Good enough! Get an Apple Air - and then use it for 30 days. Most things that will fail will fail in the first 30 days. So work it just to be sure. Get USB external storage for backup and you will be golden! Have a safe trip and enjoy!
netexpress wrote:
Having read this thread - and a lot of great recommendations presented - I agree with this. You just need to review images. You're not looking for a desktop replacement. That machine is back home running windows. Good enough! Get an Apple Air - and then use it for 30 days. Most things that will fail will fail in the first 30 days. So work it just to be sure. Get USB external storage for backup and you will be golden! Have a safe trip and enjoy!
What advantage does the Mac air have over a windows based laptop for viewing images? Disadvantage is dealing with two different OS’s. I truly fail to see an advantage.
This is coming from someone that has converted to a Mac Studio for my workstation.
This past year or so dealing with Windows 10 upgrades/patches taking over my laptop for hours a week is what finally pushed me to Mac. No matter what I did Windows acted like it knew better than me and just kept pushing the updates. I had automatic updates turned off, had my update time set for late at night, etc, etc, And yet Windows kept locking up my machine midmorning pretty much once a week pushing updates and using all my resources. Pretty common issue as I continued looking into it. Yet to run into any such nonsense with my Macbook and don't expect it. Not even an Apple fan but they do seem to build a superior product.
I'm old and certainly did not want to switch operating systems. But the more I researched the more the obvious answer became Apple.
Personally I don't find processing photos to take a lot of power lately on my software. If you're processing a lot of images every night might need a faster computer, doesnt sound like a fun vacation though
jamesdak wrote:
This past year or so dealing with Windows 10 upgrades/patches taking over my laptop for hours a week is what finally pushed me to Mac. No matter what I did Windows acted like it knew better than me and just kept pushing the updates.
I don't care what OS people choose to use, I have Windows 11 and I don't have your problems that probably are user error or you bought a crappy laptop because of the outdated OS you used. If you want MACOS because you use Finalcut or any other app that doesn't exist in Windows or you are heavy invested in Apple ecosystem or you use the laptop mostly on battery and you need power and battery life that is acceptable to choose an Apple laptop, what you wrote is not.
I'm a very advanced user and I know in detail MACOS and Windows and the MACOS interface is outdated and way behind Windows, I don't see people blaming Apple M4 Max laptops where Apple dynamically adjusts the power to consume less power causing issues in some cases with rendering to name one, it's a trick that in other systems doesn't exist and for that the heat, none OS is perfect but I hear most of the time a user blaming a OS because of their lack of technical acknowledge than anything else, the same is applicable for photography.
chez wrote:
What advantage does the Mac air have over a windows based laptop for viewing images? Disadvantage is dealing with two different OS’s. I truly fail to see an advantage.
This is coming from someone that has converted to a Mac Studio for my workstation.
Lightweight, very low power consumption, small, snappy performance for the price if you just running something like Adobe Lightroom and all the USB-C ports just work. That last one can be a big deal because there are a lot of Windows notebooks were you can't really get optimal speed no matter what they advertise because they'll do stupid things like share PCIe lanes with USB-C and Ethernet. So if you want to run your catalog directly to a NVMe in an ACASIS or ANYOYO 40 or 80Gbps M.2 NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD Enclosure - you'll get 40Gb/s. That's not always true on Windows notebooks. That's just my experience. I'm mainly a Linux/Unix guy but I have a high end Windows 11 desktop which I love for all the different software it supports. I also have a Mac M3 Studio Ultra which I love just for photography / Video and I have several MacBook Pros. I don't currently have the air myself because I like having more batter life. But if this is strictly for travel they make sense. I used to have one when I was on the road a lot and it was nice. I could tuck it anywhere. But yeah if you are a road warrior but need access to all kinds of software and don't mind the power consumption and research if the notebook's USB-C power really works at full speed, Windows notebooks fit the bill. It just depends on your needs!
Personally I don't find processing photos to take a lot of power lately on my software. If you're processing a lot of images every night might need a faster computer, doesnt sound like a fun vacation though
I like ASUS too - used to live a couple of miles from them and they are super friendly and will do repairs very inexpensively. They used to repair stuff that was out of warranty for me. I'm not sure if they still do or not. I haven't owned an ASUS notebook for a while. But I use one of their motherboards in my recent Windows 11 builds and it just works as expected.
I just came to Colombia /Ecuador for a few months. I bought a new MacBook Air. M4, 24gb ram, 500gb hard drive. Picked it up on sale at B&H. I use Lightroom, Photoshop. Could not be happier. Light and easy to travel with. Small , can throw in a back pack. Battery life is excellent +. I bring a 1TB small drive for extra storage. I shoot allot of pics. Does all I need.
In a place far far away,, I worked with PC's in my daily life.. Never again.
gkinard1952 wrote:
I just came to Colombia /Ecuador for a few months. I bought a new MacBook Air. M4, 24gb ram, 500gb hard drive. Picked it up on sale at B&H. I use Lightroom, Photoshop. Could not be happier. Light and easy to travel with. Small , can throw in a back pack. Battery life is excellent +. I bring a 1TB small drive for extra storage. I shoot allot of pics. Does all I need.
In a place far far away,, I worked with PC's in my daily life.. Never again.
And that 24MB's of RAM goes a long way on a Macbook compared to a PC notebook...
artsupreme wrote:
If you only had one machine to do everything on I would agree, MBP is obviously better. But since we are talking about going on safari here, I think most people who can afford expensive travel like that have a main machine at home, and a lightweight travel machine for the road. MBAir is a great option for the road and it will handle everything you throw at it, but I agree if you are doing heavy batch processing often on the road an MBP would be a better choice, although heavier and bigger.
Battery life of an Air would certainly be better. But on the weight side:
MB Air 13: 2.7lb
MB Air 15: 3.3lb
MB Pro 14: 3.4-3.6lb depending on model
So the weight difference between the MBA15 and the MBP14 would be hard to justify as a deal breaker. It might be somewhat more noticeable versus the 2.7lbs.
I saw in another response that the OP's main machine is an x86-based Windows machine. I have a similar setup - my Laptop is a Macbook Pro, and my main "server" machine is an older home-built Xeon box. Adobe software as well as Topaz and DXO apps (those are what I've tried) run equally well on both platforms, and with a good network at home, it's easy to move large amounts of photos and data between the machines.
citytrader wrote:
I don't care what OS people choose to use, I have Windows 11 and I don't have your problems that probably are user error or you bought a crappy laptop because of the outdated OS you used. If you want MACOS because you use Finalcut or any other app that doesn't exist in Windows or you are heavy invested in Apple ecosystem or you use the laptop mostly on battery and you need power and battery life that is acceptable to choose an Apple laptop, what you wrote is not.
I'm a very advanced user and I know in detail MACOS and Windows and the MACOS interface is outdated and way behind Windows, I don't see people blaming Apple M4 Max laptops where Apple dynamically adjusts the power to consume less power causing issues in some cases with rendering to name one, it's a trick that in other systems doesn't exist and for that the heat, none OS is perfect but I hear most of the time a user blaming a OS because of their lack of technical acknowledge than anything else, the same is applicable for photography. ...Show more →
, fair points to a degree. Let's just say that one thing was the icing on the cake reason.
I'm not a total novice either, having worked as an Information Assurance Officer and SysAdmin on Windows machines. I've been frustrated with Microsoft for years. Maybe the MAC will prove just as bad over the years but I truly doubt it. It does everything I need now with ease and I fully expect this to continue for years and years.
aboulenein wrote:
Battery life of an Air would certainly be better. But on the weight side:
MB Air 13: 2.7lb
MB Air 15: 3.3lb
MB Pro 14: 3.4-3.6lb depending on model
So the weight difference between the MBA15 and the MBP14 would be hard to justify as a deal breaker. It might be somewhat more noticeable versus the 2.7lbs.
I saw in another response that the OP's main machine is an x86-based Windows machine. I have a similar setup - my Laptop is a Macbook Pro, and my main "server" machine is an older home-built Xeon box. Adobe software as well as Topaz and DXO apps (those are what I've tried) run equally well on both platforms, and with a good network at home, it's easy to move large amounts of photos and data between the machines
I had the MacBook Pro 14. I travel allot. It was the best laptop as far as doing everything IMHO. But, on my last hop it got a very little water on one side of the keyboard and fried it. I decided right then the cheap air was for me when traveling. I will never buy another really expensive laptop for travel.
As far as weight , size, and speed the 14 was near perfect. The Air I am using now is pretty sweet for travel though. I just don't need heavy lifting when out and about.
netexpress wrote:
I like ASUS too - used to live a couple of miles from them and they are super friendly and will do repairs very inexpensively. They used to repair stuff that was out of warranty for me. I'm not sure if they still do or not. I haven't owned an ASUS notebook for a while. But I use one of their motherboards in my recent Windows 11 builds and it just works as expected.
That is an excellent point. I was making more the are you sure you want this point, but Asus has been around for years, and it's probably excellent for photo editing and has plenty of speed
aboulenein wrote:
Battery life of an Air would certainly be better. But on the weight side:
MB Air 13: 2.7lb
MB Air 15: 3.3lb
MB Pro 14: 3.4-3.6lb depending on model
So the weight difference between the MBA15 and the MBP14 would be hard to justify as a deal breaker. It might be somewhat more noticeable versus the 2.7lbs.
I saw in another response that the OP's main machine is an x86-based Windows machine. I have a similar setup - my Laptop is a Macbook Pro, and my main "server" machine is an older home-built Xeon box. Adobe software as well as Topaz and DXO apps (those are what I've tried) run equally well on both platforms, and with a good network at home, it's easy to move large amounts of photos and data between the machines.
Yeah, I carry so much gear that one more pound wouldn't make a huge difference although sometimes it does on safari, boat, motorcycle, snowmobile, etc. With that said, I chose the 13" MB Air for my weapon of choice on the road. I also have the new MBP 14" Pro but that stays at home. I'm one who can't stand working on a tiny laptop, even if it's 15" or 16". I prefer to do all my heavy editing on my home machines that have minimum 27" displays connected to them. When working on a laptop only (that's not plugged into a large display) I feel handcuffed, as if Im' looking at the world through a telescope. So for me, for a laptop on the road, especially for safari, would be the lightest thing possible that can actually handle photo and video editing if I choose to edit a few photos before I get home. And the little MB Air is the perfect solution. If I was one to do heavy editing on the road, I would take the 14" MBPro and add a pound to my truckload of gear I travel with.
). It took everything I threw at it with style and grace.