Apple Releases Mac OS X Lion and New Thunderbolt-equipped MacBook Airs

Ryan Koo

07.20.11 @ 11:38AM Tags : apple, lion, mac, macbookair, osx, thunderbolt

As expected, Apple today released Mac OS X Lion on the Mac App Store for $29.99. Also debuting are new Sandy Bridge MacBook Airs, which are said to be “up to” twice as fast as the previous generation (on which I’m typing this), and now include high-speed Thunderbolt ports, Bluetooth 4.0, and backlit keyboards. The Mac Mini also received a refresh, dropping its optical drive and adding a Thunderbolt port, and Apple also released a new 27″ Thunderbolt display. For filmmakers, Lion and Thunderbolt are the main stories.

More on OS X Lion in a bit; for now, my main question about the new Airs is whether they’re fast enough for mobile video editing. The answer would seem to be yes, as my current MacBook Air runs Final Cut Pro (both X and 7) relatively well, as long as we’re talking ProRes footage. But the new Airs also move away from discreet nVidia graphics to an integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 chipset, which shares memory with the laptop’s main RAM. While Apple notes it has a “on-chip engine for video encoding and decoding,” which Final Cut Pro X will presumably take advantage of with its OpenCL architecture, no one will know how well these laptops fair until they’re in the wild.

Links: MacBook Airs, OS X Lion

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6 COMMENTS

Logan Reynolds on 07.20.11 @ 12:15PM

Common Apple… I’m waiting for a new Mac Pro!

Reply
dan on 07.20.11 @ 5:14PM

New Macbook Air 13″ vs a Macbook Pro 15″ for on the road, run and gun with FCPX? Mac air looking the lighter better option now, what you think Koo?

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- Calvin Lee on 07.22.11 @ 4:55AM
  
  I think that the 13″ MacBook Air would serve well as a complimentary machine for some quick demo edits on the shoot. Sadly, I fear that it’s ability as the GPU just isn’t fantastic. Maybe when we get a GPU Dock like the Sony Vaio Z where we could plug in a better GPU into it’s Thunderbolt Port… Then I would consider it as a good Video Editing Device. (If the GPU isn’t big and bulky…)
  
  Reply
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