Question An affordable MacBook for editing & work ?

[Lore5]

Hi everyone!

I need to buy a new MacBook, and I am in dire need of advice

I am looking for a portable MacBook that can run Photoshop and Lightroom at the same time.
Other than those programs, I use it for classic Google Drive work and file classification with an external disk drive.

I am also on a budget because I work as the coordinator of a marine NGO!
So if I could keep the price under 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs), that would be great

Thank you for your time!

Lore

 

[turtletarget111]

I would recommend Apple's Certified Refurbished website. You can get nearly brand-new devices that have been repaired and tested by Apple with Apple certified hardware for a significant discount. This website is first-come first serve, so if you see a product, you should order it sooner than later. That said, this MacBook Air M3 should serve you well for your use case. It's 15" for lots of screen real estate, has plenty of storage at 512GB, and, most importantly, 16GB of memory for the Adobe applications you intend to run. MacBooks with more than 16GB of memory are very hard to come by without spending significantly more money, so 16 is about the best you can do on an Apple product.

You might have different stock based on your location, but just be on the lookout for those same features. At least 16GB of memory, the size or color you want, and however much storage you think you will need.

 

[Tom'sMark]

Hi everyone!

I need to buy a new MacBook, and I am in dire need of advice

I am looking for a portable MacBook that can run Photoshop and Lightroom at the same time.
Other than those programs, I use it for classic Google Drive work and file classification with an external disk drive.

I am also on a budget because I work as the coordinator of a marine NGO!
So if I could keep the price under 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs), that would be great.

Thank you for your time!

Lore

Any MacBook equipped with an M chip can handle Photoshop and other creative tasks effectively. The prices of MacBook M1s have decreased recently, with some good deals available. I would recommend visiting the Apple website, that turtletarget111 said to check out their certified hardware or trusted repair and refurbishment sites.

From a quick search, the MacBook Air M1 was originally priced at £1,000 when it was released, but it is now available for £440.

Here is a review of the macbook air M1 and how it hold up in 2025:

 

[palmsaresweaty]

Or you could just get a 2017 or later Intel Mac.

 

[LordVile]

The base M4 air is 1050 but you’re getting a lot of laptop for that. You’re moving up to 16GB from 8 on previous gen’s which would take you to the same price point or higher and the intel ones just aren’t worth getting

 

[LordVile]

Or you could just get a 2017 or later Intel Mac.

Why would you ever buy an Intel Mac now? They’re all slow, overheat and are due to be cut from support within 3 years considering we’re already at 8th gen intel being the latest supported with the last gen Intel Macs being 9th.

 

[palmsaresweaty]

Why would you ever buy an Intel Mac now? They’re all slow, overheat and are due to be cut from support within 3 years considering we’re already at 8th gen intel being the latest supported with the last gen Intel Macs being 9th.

If you think that all Intel Macs are slow, you should probably just get a Windows laptop or desktop.

 

[LordVile]

If you think that all Intel Macs are slow, you should probably just get a Windows laptop or desktop.

Considering I had a 16” intel MacBook Pro I can tell you they are. The top spec intel MacBook with a 9980HK is decimated by the base M1 air. They have comparable multicore performance with the M1 having much better single core and that’s before the i9 overheats and clocks itself down. That’s not taking into account the amount of hardware acceleration the M chips have for the use case that the intel chips simply do not.

I had a base Intel 16” and swapped it for a base 14” M1 Pro gaining around 2x the performance, much better battery life, lower noise, a better display and more ports.

 

[palmsaresweaty]

Considering I had a 16” intel MacBook Pro I can tell you they are. The top spec intel MacBook with a 9980HK is decimated by the base M1 air. They have comparable multicore performance with the M1 having much better single core and that’s before the i9 overheats and clocks itself down. That’s not taking into account the amount of hardware acceleration the M chips have for the use case that the intel chips simply do not.

I had a base Intel 16” and swapped it for a base 14” M1 Pro gaining around 2x the performance, much better battery life, lower noise, a better display and more ports.

That's because it's a 16-inch Mac, the 13-inch ones perform better than the 16-inch ones because the GPU has to display less pixels.

 

[LordVile]

That's because it's a 16-inch Mac, the 13-inch ones perform better than the 16-inch ones because the GPU has to display less pixels.

No dude just no. The issue with the Intel Macs is the intel chips overheat due to intel missing 10nm for years and we ended up with 14nm+++++++ they’re also much slower because of this because unlike the desktop chips they couldn’t just keep upping the power limit to improve performance. The Apple silicon chips are better than anything from the intel side, it’s a measurable fact. Anyone who buys an Intel Mac now, aside from niche applications that require boot camp etc, is making a poor decision.

Again I have had both products, I know the issues with the Intel MacBooks.

 

[palmsaresweaty]

No dude just no. The issue with the Intel Macs is the intel chips overheat due to intel missing 10nm for years and we ended up with 14nm+++++++ they’re also much slower because of this because unlike the desktop chips they couldn’t just keep upping the power limit to improve performance. The Apple silicon chips are better than anything from the intel side, it’s a measurable fact. Anyone who buys an Intel Mac now, aside from niche applications that require boot camp etc, is making a poor decision.

Again I have had both products, I know the issues with the Intel MacBooks

Okay, but the desktop Intel Macs are better than the Macbooks because they can actually have a proper cooling system.

 

[LordVile]

Okay, but the desktop Intel Macs are better than the Macbooks because they can actually have a proper cooling system.

No? The M2 Ultra in the Mac Pro is around double the performance of the Xenon in the 2019 model. Again Intel with 14nm++++ and you can’t really crank the core clocks up that high on a CPU that large. The only real weakness is GPU power but you couldn’t only use AMD anyway so the old Mac was limited regardless and now you can have hundreds of GB of VRAM for LLMs which is extremely useful and exclusive to macs at this price point.