Macbooks. Underpowered?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m considering buying a new or refurb MacBook and I’m wondering if I’ll notice how *unpowerful *it is. I’ve read that it’s not as slow as “expected” but I don’t know what to expect, ha!

The most I’d really ask of it is to play my iTunes while I do some hobby-level Photoshoppin’. Should I expect to be disappointed? Merely noticing a bit slower performance is ok, but I don’t want to watch the spinning beach ball with every click.

Also of note, I currently have a ~2014 McBookPro (2.6 GHz, i5 w/ 8GB ram) that’s my daily driver.

2

Nope.
Just don’t expect awesome performance from a MacBook Air (although they are plenty fast).
A core i7 is about as fast as you can get in a laptop. If you opt for a lower-performance chip (an i3 or i5) you get better battery life at the cost of reduced speed.

But, any modern machine can easily do what you want.

FWIW, my brand-new 2016 Core i7 2.9GHz MacBook Pro benchmarks at about 30% faster than my huge desktop machine, a 3.4GHz Core i7 2600K Hackintosh.