The community in the Hardware forum may have more suggestions regarding the limitations you may face with using Premiere Pro CC on the 13-inch MacBook Pro from 2012. Since the OS upgrade is free from Apple I would encourage you to upgrade at least the operating system to the latest version supported. It's hard to make a determination, the new machines are too new, many of us haven't even seen them because of the closures. We don't know exactly what you're editing, but I've been working with a 2013 15' MacBook Pro with students, it's worked out fine for 5-10 minute videos, I can't imagine the new ones wouldn't be fine, albeit hot or noisy from time to time.
A MacBook Air is not going to give you the same level of performance of a MacBook Pro. The latter machine, as the name suggests, is specced out for professional creatives who use their computers for CPU-heavy tasks such as video editing and music production. That being said, Airs are still pretty powerful machines and – depending on how much strain you’re planning to put your computer under – they should perform reasonably well.
The MacBook Air (2020) is the best. You can read more about the 16-inch MacBook Pro in our guide to the best MacBooks. The main reason to buy a pro laptop is its performance, so.
Some CPU-intensive tasks such as rendering and exporting finished projects may take a little while on a Macbook Air, but if you can live with that then this shouldn’t be a problem. In addition, actions such as scrubbing through footage can sometimes be a little bit laggy when running Premiere Pro on a MacBook Air, especially if your Air is working particularly hard.
If you’re looking to buy a laptop specifically for video editing, then the MacBook Air is definitely not the best option. That being said, if you already own an Air and are wondering whether it’s worth getting Premiere Pro to run on it, then your current laptop should handle the basics fine – just don’t expect lightning fast performance all the time!
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